aphrodite's garden volume 9 part 4 - 1988-1989 November-January

work & days: a lifetime journal project

29 November 1988 How does the story go. "I want you to, I like it." So he does. Thoughtfully, for himself, push, push, push, and falls forward grabbing me, as if for help. That's what I liked, this big spider of arms and legs in convulsion throws himself into my protection. Kisses on the porch, dark when he arrives and still dark when he sits on the table to put cold gumboots on, and mud flakes off them. He was really wanting it! Two weeks and what else. We had shifted ahead, he had, as if he'd been rehearsing. He hasn't caught on to suspense, he's earning by inches, but he was surprising me with free hunger and when he'd see me look at him a freer laugh acknowledging. There are kinds of free I'm not, though I sleep next to him now. Opened the page to Jam's piece and loved his neck while he looked, and though that was to her it was with him. What wasn't there is the deep heat. I'm happy for a little that welcomes him, but there isn't the circuit through imagination or anything to scare me. Macho sluts from Laiwan, to set beside Plato. Pat Califia 1988 Macho sluts: erotic stories Alyson Books I'm liking him. Why. He's private and doesn't try not to be, and at the same time he's good natured and sweet and willing. Doesn't at all try to be a man and is mysterious without cunning. That doesn't say at all what it's like with him. For instance looking upward from under his chin and seeing the cartilage rise of his nose, chin falling back from it, an old husband snorting on high pillows. Other times the girly wisps around his earring, denim collar of a fourteen year old, swinging his big boots outside my door. Hi sweetie you were the only thing in the whole of this day. Is that a sin? I feel it is. "A way of life with the eidos in view" meaning that when I give the day to nookie I'm bound to search through it for something I can make of it in the other chamber, this one. (I wanted to be doing it with him.) But what I make here is the being that will go on - I'm seeing my two screens, soul is the one that overlies the otherness to add up to the event. [if eidos became in Aristotle species We retain only their relations; and enclosed as it were in limpid day. A couple of centuries when they're learning to read in their own rooms silently. Real philosophical discourse tries to know its hearer. These doubts accompanied him through his life's work. Imitation and ideal Where does the ideal come from? Maybe that's what's left in Plato, a good question that has generated picturing. Le Guin has the surge of the ideal.   Spider's question - why is the 'nervous system' seducible by poisons and cruelty. Innocence means not wishing harm Corrupting means making them want to harm What's wrong with this way of thinking   Sifting Plato or any other If you call body the fact of seducibility   Particles collected 'attract' others   Any density increases Begins freezing in separate isolated spots. In each domain ice crystals are oriented in one direction but there is discontinuity at the boundaries. "very massive one-dimensional objects called strings" at domain boundaries random fluctuations magnified by continuous inflation We perceive order and pattern in dots that are totally random. universe exhibits a filimentary structure luminous matter and dark matter Planck time "the earliest instant present theories can address" one particle that is its own antiparticle - an asymmetry that allows a remnant "Since inflation represents an expansion of space rather than a movement in space" like supercooling, when it freezes suddenly energy is dumped, but as mass rather than heat] December 2 Worth doing: getting to know other beings as such comprehending universe finding farther reaches Traveling with a baby whose clothes get lost. 3 Outside the bedroom window light through an emerald green wave, emerald green leaves standing above the crest, large round leaves like lotus leaves on edge. I turn looking for my camera, setting it, back to the window. The light is gone, it was the last horizontal ray, the sea is flat and grey. She chides me. A woman on the phone, do I know her, someone I've met and who I may be confusing with someone else. A tall thin woman with short hair. She says The waves and The dispossessed, did she say The dispossessed? were what meant most to her. Something I should stick to. Josie's opening. The big space full of large pictures, Josie ten years later, Sibhion a lady with curved hips, Diana and Ina and Sandra, Shan the lovely, Tania and Robert and Dylan, Laiwan and Louie, Sandy and Rhoda and Costello in her skullcap. Jo Cook. Vindicating, why should I feel that. Because they were scorning her and I backed her. Is that what happened? And what about this work now? It's 'painting'. What else shd it be. Often it's fantasy not creation. What would creation be. This is the uneasy moment. Sure it's creation, it's a color place. But it's a color painting not a color place. Shd there be a, yes there should be a, coherence feelable behind. As if something tightknit invisible but inferrable in another dimension. 5 Noticing what a labour of bracketing I do in theoretical reading. 'I doubt this means what he means but is the picture good for something else.' Reading about galactic creation I'm out there. I find myself thinking about learning to think, the way it gradually condenses into methods like bracketing. Are there discourses only very intelligent people can get into, and wd these discourses find a different kind of order - and then, sighting at the apex. When the physicists talk about god it is as if they are saying god is the man they will be when they know. 6 [with Joyce] She didn't like the valiant tomboy hanging on, not good for the horse. I was having to defend her, she has a difficult horse, she didn't choose it, she just found herself on it, she's doing well keeping out of the way of the hoofs. I liked them both but she didn't. 7 Sendering. Jake K talking about what he's going to do at Oxford. Pictures. I assume writing too. He's been getting up before man's work days and studying. What was the word? He shows it in the dictionary, movement against the stars. Painting? No. He's starting to move away. Photographs? Must be. Black and white pinpoints. Loveliest fucking. The shapes of warmth in my hands and his. You're keener than you used to be, you must be getting used to it. "It's like everything else. I'm more comfortable." "Yes you are." I got my right knee under his hip and left knee between his two so we could lie on the pillow. The friendly way he has. He could lever right up under, a long way it seemed. What is it I can't gather to say. The marvel I feel when he muscles in. The marvel was still there on and on slow and steady, ecstatic, not the blue ditch but an expansion of buzzing air. The way I like it best, so a kiss has the whole body in its curve. Inspired. And not at all finished when he was, adoring this morning, so steeped in sentience. But his remarks were as if from someone not there. I keep wanting him to say something to let me know he's there too. He's in the bathtub dressed in water. I bring him tea, set the cup against the wall by his shoulder. He tells me about federal money to send artists to the Arctic - yiieee. This is what it feels like to be struck by something to do. send n. the flow or impulse of the waves, to move by the force of waves scend to heave upward as a vessel on a wave sendan OE here to there, out make rapturous with joy (sendal sennet sennit sinnet) fabrics and weaves scandere to climb scan Shekhinah dwelling place, a cloud of glory that accompanied the tabernacle, divine presence skene a tent - The way there's begun to be assurance, that when we're there for the night we're going to be in each other's arms and we're going to fuck. I love to read that sentence. And this morning. The alarm at 6, falling asleep again wrapped up together, lying alone in the lamplight while he's getting himself up in the hall, looking at the robin on the wall, Robertus ink in skin, crimson and blue, the scribe's hand, tailfeathers in parallel, wing feathers lapped, spots on the body, I in it, bed in light. Polar Continental Shelf Project, Energy Mines and Resources Michael's being stern. Don't tease he says. We sit at Carnegie making formal conversation. He looks fine in his green work shirt and dress pants, red beret, stretched lip and close shave. You're looking fine I say looking at his lip. Don't rub it in he warns. Rub it lightly I say as it flies past, meaning, I guess, don't make so much of it. But he's made more of it. Well I made a good joke, I'll own up to it. You're full of shit he says a couple of times in his eloquent way. You should control yourself. I'm soon putting my jacket on. I'll see you around. Laughing on the street in delight to have got to be such a Jezebel. Sober at another moment. The parts that don't jibe. He claims I enslave his imagination but if he's so mad to screw me why doesn't he get hard like my engineer - hmm. You're not even hard up, that's what puzzles me I said. Did it again. Does Jake mean a part or capacity of mine     Intelligence     no Cosmological interest     Does it have anything to do with the real Jake K     no Is the dream a clue about work     Does scendering mean something in particular     Traveling through or across the stars     no Does it mean something to do with that image of star circles     Centering     Am I onto something with this possibility of going to the Arctic     Is it related to some kind of polar centering     Am I going to get there within 6 months       Did Jam need to defeat me as a rival in writing     Did I need to defeat her     Did she defeat me     Does it mean I'm eliminated from writing       Is it my eyes looking at it that makes it move     no Small movements of the hand     A different nervous system     no   Do you know the state, well-being, of people at a distance     By some physical means     no Is there such a thing as psyche different from physical     Is 'physical' one model among others     no Is the physical model the true one     Do you have a physical way of knowing how people are at a distance     no A psychic way     Are soul and body really different things     Do I have a soul     no Did I ever     no Does Mary     (stops) Does anyone I know     (stops) Is there a life after death     no Before conception     no Are you able to lie     no Is the psychic a function of the body       Is there a teaching job for me somewhere in the States     California     no Colorado     no Arizona     New Mexico     no University     no Buddhist or religious place     no Little college of some kind     sort of Something to do with film     no Seeing and 'seeing'     no 'Philosophy'     Am I reading you right at all     Art school     no Teaching job for me in Arizona     Near Mesa       Am I meant to live alone without lovers for the rest of my life     no Am I ever going to have a real and deep and full companionship     no But real good work     ? Contented without that companionship     no Am I going to be able to find a way to be centered in being alive     Do you really think Joyce is bad for me     Do you see the parts of photographs I don't see till later     Am I a bad person     so-so   Was her work better ten years ago than it is now     Is she making it too easy for herself     Does it have something to do with honesty     Am I too dishonest now to be an artist     Is it possible for me to be more honest and survive     Does honesty have something to do with my relation to you     Does therapy work against honesty     Is Laiwan a real artist     no Is Lis     Is Lis honest     Do I have it in me to be a real artist     Was I really an artist when I made trapline     Is art the best use of me     (stops) Do you think I should do this herb garden     no Would it be better for me to be somebody who helps underprivileged people     no 8 Four hours this morning surveying in the rain, jeans ice cold from knee to thigh, brown drops breaking from the rim of my hat. Rick marveling the way every point fell into line - my benchmark was right, through all these summers I did hold onto two stakes that would yield the grid. 9 Lemon thyme bush one year old chopped with the spade became thirty-five plants in pots. A clearing in the afternoon, lay my coat on the cement table, heave mandarin shells across the garden to the compost, orange streak brings up Zinzolin's head. I also enjoy taking the garden apart, without thinking much about making it. I like unfixing the beds, harvesting plants multiplied by 30. Harvesting soil. [taking apart the acre of garden land we've lost] 10 Looking in the last journal seeing so many starts that don't resolve. My study life breaks apart. I forget it as if I'd never done the work. If I assume there's a true kernel and I can get to it, can I figure out what's necessary to it and what to drop. 11 And at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things. Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities. 12 Invest the money, set up a foundation for women in math, put interns into chaos studies and Oxford, bring the interns together into a house with a housemother, other interns in psychic studies, a few artists in res, men but always subtly outnumbered, a farm for the kids, some very shrewd social balancers, a wise cook. - Already I feel a world within / opening its gates and in it all the real substances / of which these in the outward world / are shadows which pass away Yesterday searching through boxes in an abandoned house. Last night moving to Ottawa, leaving Rowen and all my things. Intention gathering to stop seeing Joyce - why - she was disapproving of me - economically - also she doesn't know what I should be doing - she was moralistic about a dream that wasn't moralistic. [In it all I'm carrying the image of the one I love As if what's read or said is held up on the left for a spatial gaze on the right to judge. Something I learn by seeing nature move Perception that generalizes less or differently than naming does Did my encounter with them and drugs in some way wreck me     Am I still wrecked     (stops) Were they in some similar way wrecked by drugs     (diagonal) Am I still wrecked     (diagonal) Did I in some way find my gift or brilliance in that time     (diagonal) Have I still got the lucidity I had when I made trapline     (stops) Does it freak you to talk about this question     (stops) Have I still got it in me to do genuinely good work of some kind     (diagonal) Are you afraid that I will ever kill myself     (stops) Did my lameness have anything to do with my failure in London     (stops) But did the fact of it help me get the CC     When I'm performing does my lameness put a pall or confusion on the work     Are people inclined to think me stupid because I'm lame     Is it better for my work to be seen without me     no Was my lameness part of the reason for the sense of disaster at that show     no   Is it worth pursuing Blake     14 Expanding universe, big bang etc - I wonder what it can mean to have a cosmological explanation so incredible. What does it mean to me. 1. a space-of-mind, "into imagination as into a wide dark" 2. there are other people who can think about it in ways I can't, and a history of people thinking about it and being wrong or partly right. o holy night there are so many suns   I can see a million years coming at me without moving   accidentally maybe our sun loves us those other suns love somebody else 15 He took a couple of hours to arrive, something wrong with them, I was too awake resentful wanking without getting anywhere. When he got there finally one look was more than I wanted to see, old tight little head, somebody from the thirties, a deteriorated inbred conformation, or rickets. He wasn't giving off alcohol like sometimes but he was stupid, friendly like a Mongoloid, confident, aggressive, young like a kid telling his day at school. Is he liking this? Yes. Energy and confidence. Is my energy and confidence at the garden a drunken stupidity like this one? So on. Starting to squirm away from his zombie hands. Impossible to connect. Did he do this to get to be alone. I take up my pillow and go to Rowen's bed. Get cold. Come back for the feather quilt. He's lying with the light on, narrow like a mummy with the blanket pulled over his face. Poor little red eyes. "Why did you go off like that?" "Becaws." In the morning the sky is lurid, vivid dirty tomato juice. He's dumping an alcoholic shit looking over the nice frosty roofs. 16 These States Exist now. Man Passes on, but States remain for Ever; he passes thro' them like a traveler who may as well suppose that the States he has pass'd thro' Exist no more. Every thing is Eternal. ["a totally cerebral man" Hawking "the most persistent and greatest adventure in human history," this search to understand the universe ie to imagine it out-of-body experience   What are the eidos "the four forces" 1. gravity 2. strong nuclear force 3. electromagnetism 4. weak nuclear force - rules which act at different ranges   they're wanting a singularity the stability of alternation is four an alternation on two axes say the two axes are aperiodic   "an instant when matter and energy were one"   "He was the first scientist to actually start using his eyes." Hawking of Galileo   another eidos - the speed of light - a constant   but any observer is able to detect only relative motion   I want the unification of outside-standing and inside-standing   Special relativity says if a man emits energy in the form of light, it reduces itself by the amount of energy divided by the universal constant multiplied by itself. ie a recursive structure General theory says gravity is equal to acceleration, principle of equivalence   10 field equations   A spacetime continuum means that to an outside observer a body falling toward a larger body will seem to be accelerating, ie equal space in less time or more space in equal time = curved space. To an inside observer this acceleration will seem rest.   A hypothetical observer absolutely outside = god.   "At singularity space and time in the normal sense don't exist. The equations break down." Not just matter but space and time begin then.   Quantum mechanics and general relativity are camps pitched in different places.   An entity by definition invisible. It's like outside to the second power.   Hawking himself is like a black hole, reverenced as a singular living dead.   It is invisible but has a detectable gravitational field. If it's rotating a disturbance in the neighbourhood can get away.   Event horizon Near the event horizon it puts everything into an acceleration toward c   Microwave background photons   Evaporates and explode, bursting apart in a shower of high-energy gamma rays   "One of the most beautiful papers in the history of physics"   vector bosons, force transmission - gluon, photon   That we're surrounded by shells of time which are shells of space That we see it expanding - ie there's a further past That sight ie light is the message bearer and comes at a constant speed   Space makes time or time makes space   Is acceleration there too - I would think the expansion/acceleration of time into past and here into space wd be the backward kick of gravity. Therefore if we could see far enough we could see the beginning   - if acceleration is transformable to spherical area   What's the relation between c and the rate of expansion   Quark soup high density barely separated particles that don't interact   The wall of Planck time 10-43 sec Beyond this point, time, space and matter can't be modeled On the far side may exist a self explanatory universe of ultimate simplicity.   De Sitter - an infinite curved universe that is always expanding Every point in the universe tends to move away from every other point at a constantly increasing rate Exponentially increasing Every part, at the beginning directly or causally related to every other point - ie light could travel between them   Eidos - all the features of the world, subatomic and cosmic, are described by a few laws and constants, "say fifteen."   "The only answer is that if it were otherwise there would be no one to ask why." John Wheeler takes it seriously, the Anthropic Principle   the matter principles: described by fields of one half integer spin obey Pauli's exclusion principle two groups, the hadrons = quarks and the rest = leptons Interaction principles: Strong - interact only with hadrons Electromagnetic - charged hadrons and leptons Weak nuc - all hadrons and leptons Gravitational - everything   Integer-spin fields which do not obey Pauli exclusion "A very marked arrow of time given by the expansion"] 17 Luke this morning. Rowen rushes to Michael's arms. I missed you! I missed you too baby! I know I didn't earn that. Night of the hunter. I'm at evening crying with loneliness. Taking to Joyce but Joyce doesn't know. There's my father looking beaten, he deserves it, but I am more deserted than he, and I deserve it too. And why have I had to deserve it? Why did he? Night of the hunter is a child who's the only one who knows the man of god is a killer. He's being hunted, his mother is being made crazy. I forgot the way it ended: he found an old woman who could see and would fight for him. But in his safety on the other side of that father's death he lost his record. He couldn't look at him. What else have I lost. Hope that Mary will admit what I saw or want to know my true story further. Judy and Paul are far away from what we were together. I abandoned my loved child and can't abide this little one. With Jam I lost hope that anyone would ever want to know me. Is that all? No. I'm down to sex without friendship. I pay for friendship, except for Laiwan. Is that a friend? She doesn't reach in, no. There's nobody who'd fight for my reality. Making the list dried my tears. There's that about Michael too, he has stakes in my hardness. Won't you look yonder and tell the court if that is the man who killed your mother? I was measuring with Mike Dunn at the garden. A spectre came staggering toward us, a very thin small man with a plastic litre container of paint thinner probably. I didn't know whether he would be violent so I said officiously, Excuse us please, we're busy doing something, we're working. His face crumpled like Rowen's when I'm mean. I felt I should put my arms around him. Also as if there would be no help possible. He was broken-hearted. Davis Grubb 1953 Night of the hunter Harper and Brothers [read it first at 9 or 10 in Readers Digest Condensed Books - was it?] 18 The Whore and Gambler, by the State Licenc'd, build that Nation's Fate Irene this morning coming into Carnegie with a smashed eye worse than black, a red eyeball; the group of natives on Pender yesterday wrecked and ugly as they come, "You fuckin' ..."; the man at the garden. Thinking of photographs of what I find worst to see. 20 [with Joyce] Thinking it should be said right away, not knowing how to say it, half an hour of this and that knowing the hitch was there, getting myself ready by being stroppy. "He looks so beaten." They did it themselves she says. That's her faith but how can it be true. She says you can't change yourself but you can be conscious in the moment. The moment of consciousness is given just like the rest of it, I say. Find out what else there is in this moment, what are you feeling? Ah, she means to shift me where I don't challenge her. What do I feel? Excited. There are a lot of things I'm good at. None of them are necessary. There are things that are necessary but I'm afraid to give myself to them because everything else will be gone. That may've been what she said I was too revolutionary about, wanting it too dramatic, gripping and transporting. "You get caught in eddies. What's the most important thing, underneath everything." I wasn't realizing I wouldn't see her again. I was seeing her in her green dress and good scarf and her feet one behind the other under the chair in sheepskin shlups. Arm across her midriff and hand on her chin smiling when I looked at her in a way I didn't believe. Sufis. Yes I do like heart. So what does it mean that I'm saying goodbye. 22nd "Functions of the temporal lobe recruited for that kind of experience same ones that assign meaning and realness." A kindling effect in the temporal lobes - you alter the biochemical structure of the neurons so it gets easier. 23rd A daycare center I seem to be having meals at, what should I pay, you have to do dishes, etc, throwing out bags of cornmeal with mouse droppings. Running across the table. Shall I see if I can levitate. Standing straight up beside the wall and rising. Do it in the center of the room. Gather the will and u-up, flutter-kicking. Next time easier. Now I'm up shall I try to fly. How to propel. I seem to know. Arms forward and legs wagged up and down (the way a whale swims) gets me forward, but slowly, the way swimming is slow. I catch a backward glance of myself in a mirror (it's a quotation from trapline!). When I see an open window at the end of the room I think why not, the space outside is bottomless, the room I was in was suspended just itself with no earth around. Also a dream about staying at Eric's place with Rowen finding it grander than I'd ever've thought. I mean nice, rich and comfortable. He was boring me last night with stories of the catastrophes he's been responsible for. Chased the Colonel out of the Mediterranean floor and a monster wave smashed the south coast of France. Dreamed the garden strewn with bones and an earthquake killed fifty thousand in Armenia. Two mice killed in his two traps, a suicide pact of brothers, he felt. Moskvitin's screens. And RUMI. [Blake and vision He says seeing, 'fancy', hallucination and mental 'seeing' are the 4-fold A spirit and a vision are not a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated. "intellectual vision" Mysticism is a technique - reports are secondary to discovering - effort is to unify with a supernatural - technique of ordered life and limits - by means of love - it's not for knowledge or power - sharp distinction of natural and spiritual - get rid of images, don't cultivate them - nature is unreal - give up happiness. A state of willfulness Imagining, thinking, sensing, willing If the love of God diminished, the sun would grow cold, and if the knowledge of God ceased, all the stars would lose their light. Swedenborg There are two Wills in one Being, and they cause two principles. Boehme There can be no good Will. Will is always Evil. Jesus is forgiveness. Personification - "they had a real hypnagogic power for him" "a constant movement of focusing, shifting, and refocusing" "for I feel that language in its widest sense is the hawk" - "The way he had looked at me was an unprecedented event." Your will is already opening your gap, little by little - it's an opening. It allows a space for the will to shoot out, like an arrow. Will is what can make you go through a wall, through space, to the moon - a force which is the true link between human and the perceived world. What the sorcerer calls will is a force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world. One can feel it coming out. He notices he can actually touch anything he wants with a feeling that comes out of his body from a spot right below or right above his navel. We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds. A round object with a luminosity of its own. Every part of it moved, a contained, undulatory, rhythmical flow: an incredibly fast flickering of something. I noticed that perceiving was more than sighting, it was feeling. It is also the area through which all of us die. An expanding fog moving beyond its limits. Sorcery is interference at the key joint of anything "Epigastric nerve fibers" "contract in the presence of x-rays" When it's contracted is it keeping something out     An influence from other people     no A feeling from another part of my body     More than one kind of feeling     Feelings of helplessness     When it's clenched does it harm the health of my body     Can I safely allow those feelings     no Can I do it by myself     Can I do it without drugs     Would I be a different person after     Wd I be just ordinary     no Wd I have better use of me     Do you know what I wd have to do to release it     no I wd have to feel childish helpless fear     Wd I have to keep doing it again     Wd it be really dangerous     Wd I have to live the rest of my life in relation to unusual fear     Could I still do things     Wd I do it by giving up my defenses against it     Was the quality of that time from fear being released     no Is all writing a defense against fear     no faer peril, sudden attack When the branch broke on Saturna was it the presence of some kind of a power     Does the bull mean strong feeling in general     no Does it mean fear     Having to do with my father     From before I got polio     no From being abandoned     Am I still holding back that fear of abandonment     Is it possible for me to release it     24 Mary phones. I saw her walk back from the mall with the long box of ugly carnations. She's got her tentacles slurping at Elizabeth. But I want to know why I have to be rude to her. I am not all there speaking to her, I'm precluded and hear myself talking about Elizabeth as if saying my own say that way. "If she doesn't trust you she has her reasons." Etc. But I don't want to have it out with her, I seem to want to punish her right into the ground. But I couldn't tell her I bought the flowers with her money. I know I am as if decided not to trust her, but I don't know why. I know the conversation begins civil and then she pushes me and I end being mean. Or feeling myself being mean. I don't hear her being hurt. I imagine she hangs up in a stoic blank. What I wonder is: why is she drawing that out of me now and not before. What did she draw before. Something young. That indulged showing-off liveliness. Or protective protest. Tina and Vern playing it out, she whining, he threatening. I shout down the vent like frightened god, Leave her alone. But what I mean to say is Look after yourself you whinging female, you're making him bully you. You're afraid that if you're stronger you won't love him any more and you probably won't. Alright, Mary: what could I do different. She's not able to be my parent so I'm making her my defiant child     Do you mean I should just go ahead and be a good parent to her     It said yes quite wildly. 25th "You're the only real one." Eric is drunk. I know what he means. He's the only one these days who comes right up to me (on the phone) and says boo. As for my sweetie, I was happy to have him rather than a bad book last night, but he talks like a conversation tape. Oh what can he be feeling to be speaking so far from himself. 27th Fighting with Michael today, a bit - I'm across the room behind the stove and he's telling me what he likes: that I take care of myself so I don't stink, don't let my hair get dirty, don't drink or use drugs. I shut up enough to let him speak from his real position and was moved and saw his tears and went to hold him. And then he grabbed me and I didn't like it. Phone in the aft. A pause, an in-breath, "Ah Ellie!" says Eric. He tells his stories, just now he's very taken with a woman, he sees her at a hundred yards and is filled with lust. Thinking about her, he called to see the Yin, who was a cloud, before; the earth with her eyes down. This time he saw himself in the mirror. "I realized it meant I'm a woman." "Oh Eric should I send you flowers." "Are you jeering at me?" "No, no, I'm encouraging and congratulating you." But he went on to say that if he could do what he wanted with the woman he occupies himself with, he would give that quality to her. "Why do you want to give it away!" "I want to be a man." 29 I hunted his unease and found it. It wasn't until dawn. "It's called making love because it makes me love you. I don't know why it should but it does." A dream got me ready to fight for it. He doesn't let himself like it as much as I do. Then I praise too much trying to get an admission out of him. I'd like him to be the bright eyes one who says You're amazing, I'm going to get all of you, I'm not going to stop 'til we've done everything there is. "A weird electricity." Hands. In the grey dawn wrapped around him I said "I feel like we're covered with snow," the snow we could see on the apartment roof. I had seen it for a second. "I felt we were covered, though not by snow." "Do you feel the electricity?" (Did he say hmm, I'm not sure.) "Streaks and dabs." "Did you see it?" "No I pictured what I felt." I meant it was standing quite thick around us. Maybe. 30 Should I say something about later. I hadn't come and lay down in the evening to try it, with a pencil. Was in the same quality, murmuring. Why is it embarrassing? I'm wondering if it was abandonment or my particular kind of nerve - I do it with a sense of trying it out but also I was really afloat in a warm sea of joy. Fuck me with your big cock, fuck me deep, I love your big cock, what a sweet fuck this is. I'm urged to patronize that state and keeping myself back from saying "etc." I think that the state is true in its own terms. With my body I thee worship. Weorthan to come to be. Then the question is, who jeers? What is abandoned by it. (Wd I publish it.) Thinking what I came to with Roy when I was drunk - you fill my whole sky. Ah. Does sexual adoration obsolete political adoration. Wd I stand in front of a room full of feminists and say I'm a cock worshipper? Yeah I would. A room full of men? I worship breasts too, don't take it personally. [opposite page summaries: 1. access to a mind that knows more than I do - lives in my body - can't be the I - is what's called the unc 2. two personalities - neither have a real gender - generally in conflict with each other - imagination and explanation - assertion and attention 3. wd like me to be more disciplined about work - will and doing are always the same thing - Roy was jealous of my will - Jam wanted to damage it 4. Cambridge and Mary Warnock - dreaming - too dishonest now to be a real artist - something to do with clarity and thinking (is my best talent) 5. real and full and deep companionship - no - contented without - no - but yet a way to be centered in being alive 6. value - friendships - feeling for nature 1st January 1989 Going on worried about what to do. Eight months wondering if I should get a job. At Tumbler Ridge, even. What can I do with these useless days. Pray. 2 "Coordinate identities between and among" 4th Someone pushed down the red posts. R and I broke into Henry's shed and collected tools. This evening Max says he died in July. I slammed green rocks and plant pots through mud holes. 6 A ditch filled up with small rocks, many pails. Clay goes on the paths. Pleasure of actions that have two sides. Wheelbarrow loads with two path slabs can bring granite setts. When the path is finished the setts are there to hold up the middle bed. Scrabbling for little rocks working my enmities. Dusan tears plastic for hat and cape when it starts to snow. He's deep in the irrigation ditch. The snow is dry. I can keep on working in my green sweater all through the afternoon. Thick flurries circling from the north. Where is all this light coming from. It's the snow reflecting in all directions as it falls, makes a steady state of cumulative brightness in the whole surrounding air. At times the sun shone horizontally through. I take off my mud-soaked glove and blow my nose and look. The dirt, the rocks, the green glowing grass when white lies in among them. When it's so dark I start to fall, I can't quite stop, I have to just finish, just the last of this path. and then cross Prior's river of Friday lights. Michael goes back to not speaking. I can't see how the dislike of RM will mend itself. 9 An astonishing moment. Downtown: library, shopping, coffee, bookstores, the usual, every face I encounter, I see the wrongness of. In the small bookstore I find myself startled in front of a face that's right. Will I cover myself? I didn't decide not to, I did feel the kick of my own probable disqualifiednesses, but I acted on the truth in a way that I liked. I held his look and smiled slight and clean. Then I stated my business. 10 Now my friend will you help me write the polar shelf application in a few days. It has to be clear true and eloquent. Wednesday. What's up. Stalling before the application. Set up W edge board, fiddled. Winter labour exhausts, try to ration it. Nettled and arguing. Not liking to be arguing, arguere to make clear. Not sure what he did, if anything. Come one stop saying things to hurt him, say it as if he can't hear. 12 Dressed up and sat down to write, and wrote. Sue Ditta calls from a screening of notes in origin. Betty MacPhee phoning on impulse tells me her loved dad was there sixty years ago and took pictures. Writing about notes in origin I took confidence in it. There is an intuition of form I'm alone in. Laiwan comes home. Having written the thing makes me sing. She cooks spaghetti. We watch LA Law. 13 Come up through a long front yard seeing flowers alongside the lane, daffodils, other colors. Something like - it's a farm I could work on or garden on. People coming in from the next field say something in Plautdietsch. I say something back not exactly replying but acknowledging without looking. We're walking across the field they'd come from, downslope, redbrown cultivator ribs. They seem to be Mennonites in bonnets. The one who spoke I took for a curly young man but she's next to me as a girl with her sister. The land is lying so wide warm and bright. "It's dry enough to seed!" I say taking up a warm sandy pinch. There's a rocky scarp closed in a ring of barbed wire. Is it because it's a quarry? "And for the water." Beyond it we're coming to the edge of town. Up the steep and sharp gravel shoulder onto a highway. A transport is cutting so close to the edge it will slip. The driver saves himself by a quick U turn. We're seeing another car slide across the street and crash up against a stone corner. The girl beside me, both of them, have seemed thin shy young things. They take me through a cinema audience and out the rear door. A course. Educational animation, something like. My friend (she seems to be) touches inside her collar, "Crepey skin," inviting me I think to feel her little breast. I touch the side and then really touch it, pull up over the nipple. I can feel and hear her pleasure. She comes back with her hair cut short, a too-smart cut with razored shelves. Did I turn her into a dyke? 15 At the garden alone this aft moving the asparagus bed. Good dry light stuff, rotted seaweed. Asparagus roots ripped up. Tiny raspberry plants in series on an underground wire. Dismay when the wheelbarrow goes over - twice I step into the ditch full of water. I'm on my own. Lonely but not dry. I want to say "as never before." No one is backing me. 16 Phoned Berkeley and did it. Reading Frank's letters before I slept. I dreamed him. At night I was lying singing thinking for him to hear, All on an April evening. He comes in while it's dark still, in his warm live way. Fits a wire shape on my head to show me how to fix the pipes. Etc. [at the end of this book a set of Wittgenstein notes that must come from later] aphrodite's garden volume 10 aphrodite's garden volume 9: 1988-1989 august-january work & days: a lifetime journal project