| aphrodite's garden volume 9 part 2 - 1988 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 September 1988 The states aren't separate people, but I'd like to classify them - looking at Le Guin's system - states in world and states not in world.
- Those brindles of vapour off the cup, stretching, close, a silver grain of dots pulling me apart in the middle. 18 What's the shadow I asked. Long ago this morning. (8p) it said now again - the work, the way. Flattened after a night and day with him, flattened like batten. What's the truth. I want to go far into sex and am depressed seeing how much he wants to skirt it. Control, I'm control he says. I take turns being in control I say. Liked reading the story to him, because we were in my language not his. This is like depression, the rain, wiped out - a night so remote (where's the heart). "A month, two months, then I'm on to someone else." "You go overboard." 19 A welling of sensation into the chest he says when he sees a well-grown plant of certain kinds. "I felt at home with her, but with you, I feel like you're going to take off my head." "So do you want to fool around?" The best of that when I was fucking his mouth with my tongue, to say, like this, all there. Courtesan, courtier. One who seeks favor by flattery and complaisance. 20th Depression and flu ache as if I've come out of the hype. That skeleton, with his self-starved ugliness. Now I have to get out with least damage. Dreamed they moved equipment into the garden, big hoses flooding, piles of dirt. Trying to phone the Park Board, can't get through. It was the way he wanted me turned with my back to him when he came - I have been wondering what it means that the written account is so dear to me. It's as if I was making him the occasion for something. And he me, with his recital about how "it has to be more than that." Alright can I be drunk or in a frenzy and keep my head, but in love I do not keep my head. I identify. Why did that happen. I'm wondering whether it was by identifying with politics. But no it's my habit. 21 Waking at 3. Is it M's girl I've been waking for. In spite of - [Opposite: notes on Gleick's Chaos, most not transcribed The Fourier domain. Fourier transforms. Any complex pattern into sets of simpler waves, ultimately a set of numbers, a Fourier series. In the Fourier domain correlations can be transformed almost instantly. David Bohm image-object domain unfolded, frequency domain enfolded. He got it from quantum theory. Nonlinear dynamics and chaotic dynamics. 1. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It means miniscule measuring error become huge. (Randomness is not in nature, it is in prediction.) 2. rapid divergence of nearby trajectories. Correlated variables become uncorrelated. strange attractors - geometric forms in the dynamic of turbulent fluids. point attractor, equilibrium periodic attractor or limit cycle, bifurcates catastrophe theory, jumps and phase transitions of nonlinear systems topology or qualitative dynamics, "science of forms of motion" 5 or 6 years teaching himself difficult differential equations You take a bunch of dots - those are the initial values in a computer system - and throw them on the attractor. Farmer's PhD thesis, order in chaos. How order, information and structure arise, a higher realm of order, in chaotic systems. Strange attractor a dynamical stability other than point and limit cycle. It is phaseless but it's definitely a shape. Vedic theory of vibrations in a computer. Simulation of neurons. cross section of a strange attractor "an ionic mesh of noise in the water" At each level some aspect of order emerges - I mean that a certain graininess appears that makes it nonrandom. It shapes itself into something. a linear equilibrium model / vs non- Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction, a pattern of scroll-like waves, equations Nature is self-organizing.] Monday 26th Soggy. In five days on Saturna nothing to say, getting heavier. Waking in anxiety every night. Last night the bull rushed me, up against a loose sheet of plywood. It was the diaphragm he crashed against. Reiner. I looked straight at him, the lobes of his ears set wide like lugs. And after that tried not to look at him at all. His gestures came at me all afternoon. He declared how good it was to be with me, his hands jumping on the steering wheel. He scratched his forehead, flapped his fingers out of his palm. Three years in theological college and now it's tarot and Bagwan. Standing at the counter receiving my fish and chips he was paying for, I could see 'an attractive man' with only a slight puff at the gut - tanned, hair dead but only slightly thinning, presentable - but looking at him, stealing a look, I seemed to be seeing overwhelming fear, of me, and of whatever's waiting outside his positive outlook. I wanted to seize the ring and lead him around, in spite for what he wanted from me, which was to see me as the same old Ellie, affirming life, "full of life," "communicative." I had to insist, "I was cast out first," "no, I was cast out," "because of my lameness," "lameness." "I didn't know that." "No, it's something I would never have told you in those days." And about Roy, "He was a batterer." "A batterer." "??" Then I struck myself hard on the side of my head, I wanted to strike into him, his horrible viscosity. I got to strike him later, when he asked, as he would have to, what is the difference between having male lovers and women and I said "Men can't know me." "Can't know you?" "That's right, men don't know me." At supper it was Louie who struck me. An animal game. Aardvark, armoured, and with a snout. The first animal is what you really are, the second is what you want to be. Big, graceful, investigative. The third is how you're seen. (A pig.) But I went sideways, elaborated a lemur with big eyes and psychic powers, a ghost. When she told the code and I'd betrayed myself into an aardvark I felt she'd won a contest, I'd let her by not taking it on as such. "Good game Louie" said Laiwan. Ah I thought, they've defeated the old woman, as they should, but still I went on defeated and didn't want to look at Louie after that, as if she had turned out to have more being than I, better nerve. I fished - I caught a small fish twice, the hook embedded next to the eye, into the cheek. I cut off their heads while they were alive. I stabbed crabs, put clams into boiling water. The sensation catching the fish, pulling it out, was - this really works. Same with rowing. I was on top of the deep water pulling myself along by arm, like a legless thing. frightened like swimming, getting out of rhythm in fear. Coming back home on Saturday, rowing away from Reiner on the shore, the skiff went lightly steadily over the brighteyed sea. What else. There is a smell on Saturna, on the landing yard, the sweet-tobacco maple-flower smell. Am I a person who is more alive when I am hurting someone? I think - or fighting someone. The chaos book - imagining going to Santa Cruz. There are no women. How would I ever have the mettle to exist there. Gleick James 1988 Chaos: making a new science Aardvark - tabulidentata, 1 family, 1 species, widespread in African grasslands, long ears, an elongated muzzle ending in wide nostrils, and a long, heavy tail. Tubular mouth contains a long sticky tongue with which the animal picks up ants and termites, powerful claws used in burrowing. 'Earth pig.' Thick bristly hide. 27 [with Joyce] "Go into it with a breath like a soft wind of curiosity." I did and then started laughing. [Opposite: James Tenny airborne and structure-borne, sound alive in the architecture really to study dimension and perspective in space. my own experience with living with this. I could come in and it would be different according to different weather and changes. I learned a lot about shapes ... things far away and close-up, and things appearing and disappearing and nothings. these interactions between independent systems to make something perceptible His eyes were open. He was thinking. I came back in an hour - he was in exactly the same place. 28 This morning crying. At night the solar in acute pain. Not eager to see R but his grimy face at the door I liked. Then the way he will confidently bore me for hours. And at the end, cos he asks, sure I will kiss him and the kisses are irreproachable nibbles I wd gladly go on and on in. [Opposite:
29 [my mom visits] What abt her - she's the 'humanities' - she's an endless suck of anxiety about human relations. 30 I did it - got her in and out of us without getting drained - with good moments of some kind, good enough. It wasn't an exercise tho' I'd been feeling it as that. It was a fury of stubbornness. When she'd try to push for 'intimacy' I was keeping one I, the one at the monitor, watching. It said no when she wanted to see a picture of Luke or to hear about him or to hear about London or the show. Absolute strike. "If you push me I have to be mean to you, and I don't like being mean to you so don't push me okay." And I lied just like that, I'm going to the Film Board I said (here I am at the Welcome Café). And not looking at her, keeping averted. All of it feels bad and risky and mean and arbitrary, unreasonable, like resistances with Michael, but stubbornness comes to me and says there's a reason, there's a reason, and even if there weren't - What else, I wasn't flashing and being charming. Keeping a worried watch over whether it's a hard closed-up self. Went and dug potatoes. There was my earth turned over, gunny sack with potatoes drying on them, green tomatoes, summer squash, hyssop branches upside down in a jar, lavatera stalks with black buttons, dill, fennel, mint. - The day it was.
David [MacAra] doesn't need the ten month course, he's there already shining in being. 2nd October "Thinking lacks energy." "Focus instead on the self as part of the given content." "If the sense of isolation becomes too great" What's it like - lonely - cast out - cut off. So frustrated by his refusals, what should I be doing. I could end it by lying. I mean I have to end it in a way so he doesn't win. Already I'm here at a loss with nothing I want to do. No I could tell him the truth but hold to it. [Chaos notes continued: Math becomes experimental because of graphic computation. "A new mathematics of the eye." A system that is driven and damped. Differential equations that describe how systems change continuously over time. "The slightest perturbation draws the system away from that solution." Phase space is the entire range of possibilities. traditional time series and trajectories in phase space differentiable dynamics "A complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time." differential equations smooth change, difference equations jumps deterministic disorder in math terms a bifurcation, ie change in the quality of motion bifurcations of oscillation Beyond a certain point oscillation stops and something that doesn't repeat begins. Then suddenly, still increasing the parameter, there will be a period again. Pictures of the display screen at each of a thousand different values of the parameter. The behavior actually had an exquisitely fine structure yet any piece of it seemed indistinguishable from noise. Simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties. a symmetry of scales, scaling regularities "Given an analytic problem he could almost always think of it in terms of some shape" and then transform it. Cantor set or dust One had to create an intuition from scratch. a percolation network turbulence is dissipative, "drains energy," creates drag, unstable more energy, new frequencies, incompatible opalescence the light called, any vapor near the critical point of vapor to liquid phase transitions superfluid transition in helium nonmagnet/magnet, fluid/superfluid, conductor/superconductor, liquid/vapour nonlinear partial differential equations the attractor is the point toward which every independent variable / degree of freedom / 'dimension' in phase space in the long term the only possible behaviors are the attractors stable / low dimensional / nonperiodic, ie an orbit of indefinite length in a finite area projection - hypothesized shadow return map, Poincaré section astronomical systems are not dissipative but conservative You can all of a sudden discern the whole structure of the surface, and you can feel it in your stomach. renormalizing group theory Goethe - it is the interchange of light and shadow that produces color. Color is "a degree of darkness allied to shadow." boundary conditions and singularities Feigenbaum, what sort of math formalisms might correspond to perception value of the tuning parameter intransitive systems - more than one possible stable state almost transitivity and White Earth the idea of geometric convergence - implies scaling something in the heart of these very different equations repeating over and over created a single number: 4.669 universality a mental image of 2 small wavy forms and one big one In the spring of 1976 he entered a mode of existence more intense than .... meant that different systems would behave differently A natural law about systems at the point of transition. You could see the frequencies coming in faster and faster. A general description of what happens in a large variety of systems when things work on themselves again and again. New frequencies appeared at double the old. What interests me is this shape, the mathematics of the shape and the evolution, the bifurcation from this shape to that shape to this shape. period-doubling, one bifurcation after another, infinite cascade, rich with structure the complex plane, a numerical territory Julia sets iterated processes in the complex plane degree-two polynomial equations No point serves as a boundary. Whenever two colors try to come together the third always inserts itself with a series of new self-similar intrusions. boundaries that are almost unimaginably complex Many fractal shapes can be formed by iterated processes in the complex plane. Mandelbrot set - one image in the complex plane that would serve as a catalog of Julia sets Where the set intersected the real line, its successively smaller disks scaled with a geometric regularity that dynamicists now recognized: the Feigenbaum sequence. It's a set of all the #s on the complex plane - all the complex #s, that when iterated do not run away to infinity. fractal basin boundaries The boundary proves to be a fractal set, not necessarily self-similar but infinitely detailed limits of a random process / outcome of a deterministic process A single set of rules somehow embody a final shape. Collage theorem, highly fractal shape tiled with copies of itself Dynamical Systems Collective order with randomness emerging / randomness with an underlying order Lyapunov exponent - unpredictability - whether initial point will separate "Strange attractors conflating order and disorder," mixers / entropy / creating unpredictability "His listeners could hear the deep structure." Turbulence transmits energy downscale through chains of vortices. information or discreteness / difference / 'randomness' is transmitted upscale magnifying initial randomness in strange attractor patterns When you think about one variable the values of other variables its interacting with must be somehow contained in the history of the one you know - so you can make a 3-dimensional map from one variable by plotting n, n+1, n+2 You can retrieve a strange attractor shape from all kinds of systems by embedding the data in a phase space of enough dimensions. an attractor's dimension schizophrenic eyejumps The simplest tracking is something that tends to make an error. the idea that there are universal properties of systems, built into the simplest representations entrainment or mode-locking robustness, being able to withstand small jolts flex-functioning over a range broadening a system's spectral reserve, ability to range over many different frequencies without falling into a locked periodic channel. a periodic crystal, DNA If you come over and play this game you can strike the mother code. snowflakes "highly nonlinear unstable free-boundary problem" Balance between forces of stability and forces of instability; a powerful interplay of forces on atomic and macroscopic scales diffusion at large scale, surface tension at atomic ice - molecular symmetry gives preference to 6 directions The final flake records the history of all the changing weather conditions it has experienced, falling for an hour.] 3rd October Leah's wedding. [was invited by Leah to be her wedding photographer] It was lonely, a spectacle, the way it was before, outside, other people at the centre. When I got home Rob on the phone, all he wants is to know about the meeting. I can't stand the flab of his talk, Alpine Club, Thanksgiving dinner. Cut him off bitterly. Suffering is making me ugly - black sags under my eyes and a red blotch on the chin. What it's like is panic about not having anyone - no - it is not I who feels that, it's 'the body' - I add something to it, worry that it will go on without end in pain - "I'm worried I won't be able to do anything to stop the pain and get into self-delight." 4 Garden meeting. I'm shielding myself from Rob on the right. Muggs has her body directed at him, he's at home in his voice more than before. Gretchen, Tanya. Muggs and I talking across each other for the first time antagonistically. I'm hearing the silence after anything I say, that comes when someone's speaking in unacknowledged pain. In my little distance I'm not liking Muggs either, her machine of fast talk. What I want to know is - did all my gains depend on Michael's support? And there's trash talk. And is it physical, should I go to Ingrid Pincott? And the waves of pain. Rob says Can I drop by? I'm just going out (I lie fast), I'll be at the meeting later. And take his plant and jar and walk my bike around 'til he'll have gone and let the phone ring. (Last two times was Laiwan.) I want to hurt him. By me at the table there are his hands. He arrives in his surprising tallness. Yes. But - (I know I'm shocked and sensitive but) isn't he strangely callous? He seems to give a hundred little hurts and he never acknowledges or mends them. I don't want to harm him, I can see he's harmed already. I don't want him to get away by pushing me out of the garden. I should harm him rather than go on there the way I was last night. If I love him he's going to turn into a man, is this true? I can see him if he grew into chemical manliness, quite a lovely tall gentle reasonable man. But all of it on a base of sadism. What I have to hold onto is just this one line - it isn't good for me, there is always more pain than pleasure in it for me. Don't accuse him of anything, don't complain, that's all I have to say. And then don't reconsider. And then there'll be waves and days of pain. And then there'll be freedom. And then it starts again somewhere else. The whole of creation in time and space may participate in a most remarkable intimacy, with wisdom, compassion, and moral conduct of the highest order its spontaneous expression. 4pm Having a doubt. Pain less today. Why. Because I lied and refused. Result of pain removed, supper with Rowen, flash fight with Aidan, film with Laiwan, kiss for Amnon, the women's faces talking. 5th It was alright today, maybe not, but this evening in the tinted mist, the beautiful garden color I couldn't stop moving to see. Furies biting. The pain-about-Rob-that-might-be-pain-about-Michael. So light-hearted earlier today I thought it might be enough to put him through it for a bit. But by evening haunted, haunted and hard so that when he phones I'm as if with Mary. "What's up?" "What do you mean? I must go back to work now." "When am I going to see you?" "I dunno, when I do I guess." It's bitter. Now you go through it, what you made me go through. Also knowing he could reach me if he decided to, but also that he won't. In the steam bath - oh so much holding onto the act of writing saying here - I wanted to say - mood of the warrior - listening to how I'm reproaching him - who sounds like that? Where did I learn that tone? Mood of the warrior is don't whine. 6 Making a stand for my independence, is that it? Saying to grief-self, I'll take care of you, we'll see it through - honestly this time - yes sez the rise of courage in my upper back.
So, were either of us really there? He kept grabbing me. At the end I seriously beat him off. So now I'm making phrases. But I do want to know, was that real for either of us? He cried. But he was giving off methyl alcohol. "Are you a bit drunk? Your logic is like that, persistent." "There's always a level of rejection coming at me. You don't know what I mean do you?" "I have a lot of doubts." "Yes." "You don't have time anyway, I don't know what you're crying for." I thought I'd see what came if I was really hard. He felt better, I could see he was going to be relieved. Then and there he wanted to have me not beat him off from holding me. That's a truth. He doesn't really want to fuck but he did like the holding. Well he's a young thing someway. 7 Thick night, I dream I'm looking out on the sunny porch, it's early, bright morning, he knocked and I didn't answer, did he leave anything on the porch, yes, bundles, flowers, a bureau? No the furniture must be someone moving, the man across the way. Oh - I hear a bicycle - he's coming back, sneak the door closed fast, try to soften the final click. There's Rowen just woken up, I carry him on my hip, he's fat and holding tight with his legs. There's one branch where we walk out around by another door and look at the scene, and another where we're in the tight vestibule. Two strangers, first a woman then later is it a man, say they're just looking, but it's my house, get out. It comes to chopping the guy on the head with a cleaver that doesn't seem to do much harm. The better part where I'm seeing just mountains, just the mountains, thinking, it's Vancouver, I love the sense I'm having of it, realizing I'm in the centre of the street covered with a clean sheet of snow, and just under the brow so I can't see what's coming, have to get off it fast. There's a passage here difficult to say, it's the falling asleep on my back state, so rare and brief, the feeling sense of something. It's rich and complete. I was having that sense 'of Vancouver' but more than that I was feeling the state, thinking I'm here because I said no to Rob, it was right, I'm going to be able to go on in it, I'm making the change after these years, it's what I want most, to be seeing images, 'seeing' - the whole discussion was there, Bachelard etc. Going on to the London Film Coop, Vancouver branch, through an industrial yard, like London night, going to a film but closed doors behind, looking through doors, a roof where men employees are under the covers together. V curious about whether he's suffering - hope so but fondly. It was touching how stubbornly he came putting his head against my arm and crying. He didn't get proud. Something at the door, through the crack as he was leaving, I hardly heard, through my little closed gap, "I'm sorry you ..." something something. Someone there I couldn't see, and I know it, there was more to see I didn't see. 8 Then having got it, nothing to say, except the langour. 9 Lying in each other's arms kissing on and on in a translucent darkness, perfectly content and awash. I started to take off my pyjama top, he said No leave it on, I like it. I suspected he didn't like my breasts, he seemed to be trying to cover. "I can have a fantasy that we're among a lot of people." "What?" What kind of goon would have a fantasy like that? Chilled. And on, but before we can begin to recover he falls asleep. I stew. "Wake up. You either have to go home or go sleep in the other bed." He's offended. I lie in my bed chuckling coldly so he can hear it through the wall. In the morning he sits straight and indignant. He'd slept on the bed under Rowen's quilt with his legs out the end. And so on. I hold my hand on his belly and then his penis and we're joking about shy boy franchise - shy boy with big penis will do anything. Until finally I do get what I want, that simple thing. Nowadays is it really as elementary as it seems - that isn't the word - basic - fuck me or I've got no use for you. He's the way I used to be, wanting heart talk first. I'm there just relieved to have made it finally to in-and-out of no matter what quality, I don't know, maybe it's him too, he's as starved, but his refusals were for something, he was holding out for something. Am I going to overpower and corrupt him, or start to mend him - narrow little face wet with crying that he's had so little experience. It was in the hall in the dark, second night he was back persisting, and it was the moment I stopped refusing. Also I liked that he said he wanted to feel honest and would have to say things. 10 Of it what I carry is the image of his standing length. What does it mean. I see it is the kind of body shown crucified. But in my image he stands and his beautiful penis stands and he's the picture of sentience quiet and stubborn. I dreamed climbing on roofs. I'd got up past brick and vine and was looking for the spot to know how to get down. There was an upper deck like the ship's captain's, doors open, an unmade bed, rooms with children's furniture that seemed to be there from long ago, not used but ready. We could see across the estate to foreign liners come upriver, black with small portholes. The moment I'm coming to is when I'm seeing out across the park with a woman I like, teasing her about a man. I'm speaking as if to anyone, in the business way. She answers in another way that shocks and aligns me, "It's that he is a man who has never been met." Silence. "Yes I know about that." Being in the hospital - I can't form it - just that, a curtain, being put in bed. There was a lot. Yesterday Beverly said how much Michael had changed since he had Rowen. "He was a jerk." He doesn't hurt her anymore. I did that. "Ellie's really good for me, she doesn't let me be an asshole." - What are DM's disciplines. He doesn't have any, he just does things. He gets onto something and does it all day until he can't anymore, and then he does anything, cooks. What does he do about food. Organizes so he's supplied and free. Knows how to feed his work. How does he figure out what to eat. By trying things. What about 'meditation,' is he interested in that? He goes very easily into moving pictures, sits down and watches. Does he use drugs. Yes very specifically. Does he write notes. Not a lot, he sits and thinks for hours. Afterward he writes and publishes. What's the difference between him and me. He acts, he makes. Alright if he were me how would he get himself to him - - [on a seed package] buon semin non menti Musik für Nebel - These days vacant. I've liked the push of politics. This vacancy and reading feels waste. Don't know how to enter the mass. I know it's there, with its own lift and grip, but it doesn't do and I must find a doing in it. 11 [with Joyce] The bright bratty thing in A chair. How would it feel to sit down in B? Less at home. Tentative. Interesting. It has to do with which side of the body is presented and acting toward. If x is rebellion and y is (love and pain) work, then what I went through with Rob was consent to get stuck in rebellion again. "You got there by pain but that doesn't mean you have to be in pain to get there again." David McAra is clues. 12 Stuck with pain and wanting to run away. It was the other person's lie panic. I was immobilized 'til I said it. And then had to shake myself squawking and gibbering. I saw it a drawing. Natural "like leaves falling off of trees," the thing he resists doing. Is that what scrambles me? He doesn't like it when I stare. I see his crookedness and cleanness and many other unnamed things. On the chair - oh today he really wants it! I didn't say on the chamomile lawn. His face descended from the sky and kissed me of its own decision. Feeling the descent and will every centimeter so the kisses made marks like black gasps. See I'm like a mum encouraging the boy to get his confidence, but not completely giving in. Curious about how the fucking changed when I started touching myself. I started to meet his pushes with a matter of fact equality as if exactly to the halfway point, much more accurately, even when he changed rhythm to the little stopped as if curiously examining ones before he came. Altogether, though he didn't make his bed and speaks too much about Catherine and falls asleep though lightly, a good find. Then in the Inuit gallery where I am drifted in this soft clear state I come face to face with this soft clear astonishing made-thing with cuts as clear as the birch is. The shaman is a woman said to be a dead one, but the face which is said to be unalive is marked all over with the knowledge of the human person whose hand dropped red stitches from the brow up in circuits. For a while he would not make these pagan things. When he began again [the red lines] were an awkward uncomplete sort of diagonal disrespect of the face. But this one is everything everything everything he knows. Robert Jackson Dead shaman Hazelton Gitksan 13 "We are the people of the land." A language formed in place. "The center of our communities is learning" (not the business district). To say no to the ego, to remain in the Indian way and yet deal daily with the dominant culture cannot help but develop a great warrior. The more we develop our intellect the more difficult it will be to remain in balance. In the library speed-researching the birch spirit I found. She's made in more than one tradition, Tlinglit, Tsimshian, and other. The tongue means death but this one is frog, whose long tongue is the ribbon of transfer. I was in the best library state of very rapid finding, realizing the connection with frog's tongue in the Clearbrook pasture, and that she is one of Jam's faces, the ivory princess. The bird on her forehead and another made around the left eye. That frog woman is Copper Woman. It can assure us through its residual magic, of possibilities still attainable for us and our kind. "The world nearby," "the world underneath," above/below In Salish toad is linked with moon and moon with woman's craft of spinning and weaving. 14 A dream of the dark bridge collapsing where it reached the land - cracked asphalt. The other branch cracked as we found it. I, or I and my mother, had made it across, but the others were on the far side of the split. I'm in the attic of Sara's house looking for my clothes. Am I going to miss the flight with Luke because I went back to try to find them. 15 Difference between conscious and unconscious beliefs. "Thank your biocomputer for alerting you." "Alarm is activated any time something is not what it appears to be." One force in two parts, service to self and the ideal of service to others The queen's face is chastened through suffering. The left eye is an eagle's, the right eye lets out a biting black canal of tears. A night elaborated with crescents of color. The shaman is not dead, she is in agony. The left side of her face is refined to line, elegant. The right is flayed? Is it opened to show the moons of the night in her trance? The right side of her mind is collected and facing away from herself, the left side of her mind is clinging to the right side. She is crowned with feathers, her thoughts balance above her. She is the power of very great pain complexly experienced. Spirit helpers are real beings who become images. The shaman's courage could reach . 17 A slate mirror I was singing, I sang the song through twice. Goodbye blackbird. I'm not sure it was that. Zahre - Zahne? - the composer. With Peter in the library looking him up. Book with pictures of his stained glass. When he had the stone in his mouth he was there. Put the stone in his mouth so he would see. Real relative to other humans Ghosts more able to come back during periods of cold and darkness Burning a thing to send it to them 18 Through the ether. It goes when I dial the string of numbers. White scruffs in darkness like what I saw between my eyes. She says hello. A business message; and after giving a moment to what we're doing I loved it when she laughed too and I laughed more and she laughed more too. [phoning Lis in London] Sleeping beside R on a night that's off from the beginning. I dreamed Roy had burst through the bedroom window. I came into a room where Rob and Roy were naked with a woman Roy was about to fuck. There was more, strife and shock. This after Rob had had his choice and it was a heartless way without kisses. I was calculating again that it wouldn't go where I want but I won't get into cutoff pain now, I'll let it go so it doesn't take my week I need for other things. At the Film Board so ill from not sleeping, that I came to a moment of not being able to think. 24 frame fade, 24 frame gap, fade in, ... What was strange in the night was a paralysis, I cdn't tell him to go sleep in the other room. "I have things in my mind. You seem to forget about them." "What does she have coming out of her eye?" [About the shaman mask] I said "Ink, she's a writer." His house. "Can I change it?" The second one was true. Board and batten, weathered, up and down, it's so windy nobody wants to come. Not many things can grow there, maybe a rose bush in a sheltered sitting place. A latch. "The funny thing is that the houses I've made up in the last years have all belonged to somebody else, I just visit them." [Opposite, film notes:
Then today M is dropping by with Rowen in his fresh little face in his baked potato hood, and M in his different hat is looking quite clear and is willing to flirt again and says I look good. He means I guess fucked. What's to say to him - I don't trust you to be true in it. Then can I - much more than I do. 19 The mask has No masks in it too.
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