| dames rocket 1 part 1 - 1975 january - february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
This is a work of Time / but the Body feels it quicken with me. Friday 10 January 1975, Burnaby BC Luke sleeping downstairs in Akasha's house-bed, I am next to the stove, broad woodstove warmth. This long day, going through it with Luke I couldn't do it justice, it was too long and I'm too tired. The soles of my feet are still heaving over the train's floor, vivid journey finished, coming to the mouth of the rivers we followed since dawn, the river broadened in the broadened valley, and a paddlewheeler crossing - its white steam, the clouds gathering themselves up off the mountains, steam among the whited trees on the highest reaches of mountain. Hello Andy Moostash. My soul's coming back in, when I sniff the cedar firewood in the woodshed, I think it's choosing that place to rejoin me. O rocks, rockfaces. The snow crusted into corrugations, fine lines like corruscations in seashells - water marks. Trees, alone on ridges, twinned from the root, 30' stumps with trees new on top, Christmas trees grown on the ridgepole of the old tree, this looks like a good kind of forest, looks like the right kind of forest. The mountains pouring us out, we were intent, sitting crosslegged on the high carpeted shelf in the dome car, Linda in her plaid shirt, Luke on her lap as if in an armchair. Lying down, the green silk shirt flying me headfirst, on my side, hand under side of head, past the crossings where farmers in pickups, breath steaming, exhaust billowing white, watched unamazed. The sun in a straight line across the top of a mountain, sky a lightened indigo, no green in it, trunks black, needles nearly, snow weighting down the branches. A stove! A bedspring abandoned beside the railway. Two very small cemeteries. Joseph slow spoken smiling beyond Linda. Looking around, we are all smiling. Luke has taken off his shoes and stockings and is delighting various men from whom he's getting money "for our house in Vancouver." Running delirious from end to end of our section. I let him be. Or he and Serge play with Lego, Serge makes a choppé. Thought nothing could be more wonderful than the mountains, but then, packing, I looked out and saw the Patullo bridge at New Westminster, boats, piles, scarce ice shining. The upper valley. Barns, hip-roofed, with blue-shadowed horses, breathing up streams of cloud from their noses next to the ground. All images that feed me. The barn, without house, surrounded by fences, in the flats beyond the river, before Matsqui. Last night sitting next to Linda (quietly telling me about her great aunt Anne, the penknife she carried all her life) watching the play across the aisle: the fat girl, the Esquimo the Indian the Greek, across from him Cary his Irish friend, and next to Cary, the redheaded girl, face flushed out, dialogue that never hesitated, the two men fascinated with each other and the girl sometimes pulling them into her orbit, they were drunk, wild, silly, pathetic, shaming everyone with their grace and energy. We admired and condemned, but were intensely quiet and happy, because they made everyone in the coach dazzle us, the woman reading Hockey magazine, the French Canadian family, mother huge, tattooed fat forearms, pencil eyebrows, dead blond hair stretched into a hive, her two fat sons and beautiful Serge (they were from Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel). This morning when Luke well-woke me at quarter to four and we shared a tin of pineapple, we walked through the carriages looking at everyone asleep, Linda, the French, the Indian children, then Cary and the redhead. I stood at the top of the carriage looking at the two of their heads next to each other, faces very gentled, a look of something like gentleness on my own face. Cary opened his eyes and looked into mine. I looked quickly away. Gestures toward and away from. Harmonicas. Luke's leg has bruises where I've pinched him during the past two days, our trial before the mountains let us out - [Now] Judy and I mirroring: little children held by the hand, pulled onto laps and socks put on, with the same inherited gestures. A strange voice speaks to me, the body's unfamiliar (was it always so tall?), the face the same until fatigue pins it back thinner than it ever was. A sister who comes, in a sheepskin coat, leading a tall blond child, to fetch us in a white Chevy II, and then drives it away, directing Akasha, paying me an ear, like Rosalynd, competently. House. Luke says he wants to stay here forever. The train that crawled west, with its double a day behind, its triplet two days behind. The double now nearing Jasper, where it is 20 below, its triplet nearing Winnipeg, its quad past Sudbury into that first monotonous forest. It's as if we were still there, lying sideways pillowed on the green cord skirt. Andy, Roy, Tony, Sal, Sarah, Rosalynd, Penelope, Jud, Mos. The lie of the mountains toward the north; tracts of woodland in this city, as if it were new, yet a flat area marked out with lights like a map. - Who was it in my dream, holding me like a little child. Elias? A sort of pastor, married, with whom I was bound in some sort of understanding and tenderness. Behind that my orange bikini, something about finding its bottom. Behind that a house, but very dim. - Go to sleep in the afternoon, to incubate a dream: dream a house, unfinished, saws in boxes, it's an A-frame with a pale floor (I walked through the house dictating my description of it for a book; I wrote that it seemed to me that it might be my house), windows on each end, their frames partly finished (ie shaped and sanded, partly unsanded and raw) and something dark blue on the lower walls. There's a staircase to a sleeping bunk, double size. The bottom room is divided so that the area under the bed is a sort of kitchen you can walk right through. While I'm 'working', writing, a man (Redekop? I'm trying to make it out in the dream) comes in and bugs me, I get increasingly irritated and end shouting. They say I seemed to enjoy the interruption at first. I'm enraged and reply that it was meant to be a recess. It is a small house with a lot of room. Later in the dream I apply brown pats, like chocolate or mud, flat to a table surface, and see that they set up mandala circulation, convection patterns, which always seem to change, break into smaller ones, rejoin, come out of an initial boiling chaos. I see this clearly, am amazed by it. When awake am amazed that I made it in my dream. Then was woken by the disappointing news that I don't have a place in the single parent co-op. - A warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary woman takes everything either as a blessing or a curse. From now on you should let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will. I feel that is the only way for you to use your daily world as a challenge and a vehicle to accumulate enough personal power in order to get to the totality of yourself. A warrior, when she has to involve herself with believing, does it as a choice, as an expression of her innermost predilection. A warrior considers all these possibilities and then chooses to believe in accordance with her innermost predilection. Having to believe that the world is mysterious and unfathomable was the expression of the warrior's innermost predilection. Without it she had nothing. You are aware of everything only when you think you should be; the condition of the warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times. Carlos Casteneda 1974 Tales of power Simon & Schuster - Going to see Oma and Opa: through the mist at Langley, everything white except the road dissolving ahead: blank white sun Luke called the moon: it was mist compacted. Oma's thick translucent soft white skin, a few pale brown spots, like on flatbread. A lovely moment holding Grandpa's warm big hand, delicately digging a splinter out of the thick skin at the base of his thumb, because neither he nor Lucy could see it: mothering the grandpa, bent round figure in front of the house, looking glad to see the last of us. Conspiratorially coming downstairs to show me Herman's pool table. - Judy's flattened breasts: when she gets up to look at Akasha she holds her arm in front of them: the lovely breasts she had, the intensity with which I looked - the shamed fascinated stare is still there. Judy's body. Looking at her as I can't imagine her looking at me - she's much taller, paler, dark eyes in a long white face, long thin hair. I am the medusic woman, dark, deformed, Du warst auch immer so lebendig. Her legs not quite perfect anymore, but the same broad back and narrow hips, the line inside her thighs still lovely. Watching her bent at housekeeping, account-keeping, tidying, bent at them, and at the same time safe I guess - I strained wanting her to rest, regain vitality, break out; her style is quiet protest: "I don't think you should ...," strain in her voice speaking nicely to Akasha - "I don't think you should, because ..." - The moment losing Luke in Stanley Park. Just feeling its size, and how I couldn't cover it all. After I'd gone to send for the police he strolled out, his funny plodding walk, little person hunched in his parka, looking unconcerned. I crouched down to hold my head on his low shoulder, tell him how sad I'd been. He was gracious. Got lost twice more at the aquarium. The New School. The mountains sunny today. The intensity of House. How when I set out to remember Burghley Road, its beauties and its histories rush toward me - ah, rippled glass, wet slate roof from the back window. Smell of catshit in the Pither, irretrievable. Its seasons and weathers, wind; sun moving from the front window reflected off opposite windows, to the back window, morning's light coming in downstairs as well - cities, density of mirrors - Vancouver is not a real city, it is a village with direct light, lying in an unreflective socket - Tony making city visions and I scattered mirrors in my garden; we began to understand London. Well city you housed me too. Making my house partake of the city. As Tony did his. One o'clock light the other wing, the sun half circled the house and came in from the side, rich afternoon light by then, a sherry light, and how things looked in it. House what is there but you. I'd rather have you than my body, because I can see in you. I'd haunt a house. Duras does. House you house my memories like a cabinet, I open a door and behind it there's time filed, crossfiled, held in keeping, there's the cats' stuffy smell from their nest in the filing cabinet, there's the morning Roy put his wiggy in me while Luke played on the floor, there's Luke coming to give me a hug while I'm still too sleepy to stir; there's toast on the stove and coffee in its pot, taste of grounds, having breakfast with Tony or Andy or Roy or Jane or Heide or Kathy or Sarah or Greg. What lives I had in the little time I lived there. Did we say "Goodbye Burghley Road" after packing the car? O du süsse Todesstunde coming out the front door. - [Powell Rooms across from the new fire station on Powell St] Olivia on the telephone shocked me because I'd felt impregnable here, a secret person without connections. Don keeping his silence, making me feel mine. Olivia too. That was nice - "oh dear" she said. I'm not ready to see anyone, I don't want anyone I can't fly with - I want to be alone, I really want it, I need to possess my faculties all at once, all for me. Be lonely. [letter to my mom] Hello M, this is going to be just a very little note to say we're okay, have a temporary room. Luke has a daycare place and there is a good school he can go to next year. I'm looking around. Looking at the mountains. Feeling out the city to find where the good places are to live, where kinfolk are to be found. Had a good day going with Judie to see the Konrad Oma and Opa; they were unchanged, kind and affectionate. I think they liked Luke. Grandpa scratched his face with his whiskers, just as he used to scratch mine and Judie's. Grandma said to me, looking at Luke leaping off furniture in the living room, Du warst ja auch so lebendig. That was a nice pleat in time. Wanted to ask about my typewriter - is it still there? If so, is there any way to ship it to me safely and cheaply? I have a lot of writing to do and may be able to make some money at it, so it's urgent. If you think of a way can you send it c/o Judie, and I'll refund you (if I don't forget). This is jiggley because Luke is leaping on the bed. Love from us. Dear Grandma and Grandpa Ed (Grandma Mary's Epp he said), I've got two boxes of lego and I have a purple coat now. I know how to write "zoo:" one z and two o's. You aren't Akasha's grandma because he doesn't let me ride on his bike. I want everything in the whole world. Love from Luke. P.S. We're in Canada. - Do something with the politics of irritation. Fighting with Luke these days, when I went to get him at his school he didn't want to come, or pretended he didn't want to. Every evening the teachers pry him away from whatever he's doing with coy blather that irritates me as much as his rebellion. We get outside, he balks, sits down on the sidewalk. I say do what you like and keep going. He runs to catch up but trips on his too big overshoes and falls. I wait for him to get up. He balks again. I continue again. He doesn't follow. When I'm out of sight I stop and wait. Hear him crying and go back for him. A young man without a coat has come out to see to the lost child. I say, We're just calling each others' bluffs. What? says the man. I repeat it. He still doesn't understand. Says, I thought the little boy was lost. He's not lost at all, he's just rebelling, I say. The man disappears. Luke runs in the opposite direction. Stops. I go to him, say, "I'm fed up with this. In the morning I have to drag you to school, in the evening I have to drag you home." Seize his hand and pull him along. He doesn't resist. I say, "I don't think you like that school very much, you're always cross when I get you." "I don't like you very much!" He begins to hit my back. "I hate you! That means I don't like you!" "I know that, but why don't you like me." "Because you don't like me!" "Sometimes I like you and sometimes I don't." "Well I want to live with Roy, why can't I?" "Because he doesn't want you to, in fact. He can't look after you." "Why doesn't Catherine look after me then?" "She's old and anyway she teaches children things that aren't good for them." "No she doesn't." "She gives them sweets." I don't explain how I feel she teaches them to lie. "Anyway Roy fights with you too." "Sometimes Roy fights with me, and sometimes he only plays that he's fighting." We march to the top of the street, Luke six paces behind and lagging. I go into the store and buy a pound of grapes. Standing at the bus stop find some of the grapes are rotten. Give Luke a bunch in the bus. "Me keep um all" he says in his baby voice. We don't speak through the whole journey, he leans against my back after a while. I wish Roy had kept him, have fantasies of giving him away, indulge my irritation, but with a reasonable notion forming behind the self pity and resentment: I have to think about how to live, because at the moment I simply don't want him. Don't know whether he wants me or not. Remember how it was when I came to the commune and he used to leap up into my arms when I came for him. Then at the end how he refused to come home, how humiliated I was, but still, as usually, feeling it's his right and I'm not surprised he feels like that. Feeling isolated in that problem as I no longer do in some others. Dreaming a sort of graduation party; I'm wearing a white dress with a flesh colored slip under it, I feel as I did when a child: despised but proud and beautiful. I move through the stages of the dream in this mood, although there are mocking girls - Bernice? At the end I see myself in the mirror and I am blond, fat, frowsy, in a shapeless dress, with a print flannel shirt under its straps which I'd forgotten to take off. That picture with the feeling of standing at the top of a flight of stairs and putting my arms up, posing, in defiance and pride. Lying on a beach? Looking at the sky, everyone had been there, in a huddle, but leave, only a strange man remains who I feel I've kept by my own force. The white dress comes from Martha Quest and means young girl. Before I went to bed I looked at my face in the mirror and thought how old I looked, with those black circles, like Sean's when he nearly died. attention: concentration eg on "a self-image in mandala form" or koan Jungian active imagination - "concerned with ego's relation with and personal reactions to the mental images." A complex is constellated. Serves the aim of psychological connection with the archetypal. free association Fairy tales tell universal truths how the personality meets and overcomes its own dangers. necessary nourishment for the world of psychic the eyes of the man: friendly, luminous, huge, softly focused extraverted duties and introverted obligations of the ego (to establish a living contact with the unconscious) karma dharma of necessity. In fact it would seem that the development of awareness requires a very solid basis in reality: an embodied personality in the daily world and an ego that can submit to its own unconsciousness. I seemed to have touched accidentally the lever of an unknown mechanism, hidden in the extremely intricate and yet unexplored nervous structure in the body. I completely lost confidence in my own mind and body and lived like a haunted, terror-stricken stranger in my own flesh. An automatic mechanism, forced by the practice of meditation, had suddenly started to function with the object of reshaping my mind to make it fit for the expression of a more heightened and extended consciousness, by means of biological processes as natural ... did not split the archetype of the healed one and the wounded one. He stayed right with his ambivalence, believing and doubting, feeling himself found and lost at the same time. feed the sacred flame with healthy food, at proper intervals sacrificial fire, clarified butter, dry fruits, sugary substances, and cereals The psyche has an affinity for precision One idea stands out: the transformation of consciousness requires the transformation of sexuality which takes place through ritual ... It is not my sex and my pleasure and my orgasm; it is a force that flows through me, a force of play, joy, and creation. By separating the personal out of it, one can listen to it, obey or deny it, note its fluctuation and intentions .... The transformation becomes less a matter of personal suppression, an adolescent battle between good and evil, than a detached game, at once religiously sacrificial and erotically educative. Gopi Krishna 1970 Kundalini, the evolutionary energy in man with intro by F Spiegelberg and psychological commentary by James Hillman. Stuart & Watkins Parallel to this book I've been thinking of Tony, my blissful body link with him, my respect for his (partial) fastidiousness - fastidious intelligence - the something he had that Andy hadn't. The soft weak mushy quality in Andy and how awful we were in bed, it had the same feel. How Tony is and how we were in bed, has edge and strength. The dialogue I carry on in their two voices. Telling them things: Andy, you've got to tighten up your life, you're mushy (for all that, you're nice - but that mushiness I 'see' in you, does it discredit your niceness? As it does John Rowley's). Tony. Hello. It was clear beyond a doubt that light not only pervaded my peripheral consciousness but had penetrated deep into the recesses of my subconscious as well. The human organism "could be rebuilt from within" My whole system was forced to a far higher pitch of metabolic activity under the compulsion of the lustrous, vital, energy racing through my nerves a process of purgation and rejuvenation the white phase Implied is the idea that a developed relation to the anima is an essential ingredient to health or wholeness. Kundalini is a Goddess. In the dream condition I lived literally in a shining world in which every scene and every object glowed with lustre against a marvelously luminous background Waking "a narrowing down of the self, as if forced to shrink from a state of wide expansion to one of close confinement" Rather than let his ego integrate the luminous other world, he let the luminous other world integrate him. - LM Montgomery. She works the mytheme of the adolescent girl. The girl, who's all soul but full of ginger; 'self indulgent' things are things I identified with all the same. She's 'no beauty' but those of her kin think she's enchanting, elfin etc. She's anima for particular men, who're indelibly marked with her as she isn't by them. Her child friends are all orphans, her adult friends are simple minded or crippled, and they're men; although women love her too none of them understand her except Ilse who is untamed and a tomboy with rough hands. But Montgomery always accedes to marriage and children for her daughters, it seems suspect. Luke is like a violent itch sometimes, his presence is more irritating now than it ever has been, because I'm still responsible for him physically - he can fall into the ocean, run in front of a train - but he hasn't got a baby's pliability, so I either have to explain to him or else fight, and both are such a bore that I get crazed with lack of privacy. The mountains hold up their light, the water was so full of it the sky was as if shaded, and I dragged his little body about keeping it safe and organizing it to prevent hunger and fatigue. I am empty and waiting to fill, killing time, not doing Luke his justice and never forgetting it, but waiting to be alone. Sometimes I hit him, sometimes drag his arm. Shout at him with that maniac impatience in my voice, try remorsefully to explain (Luke when you talk that babytalk it makes me so cross I nearly hit you, so you mustn't do it!) but at the same time just wish I could stop at the edge of the water and take my own time with it, because I am so hungry for my own fullness. How thin, dry, irritable - mostly, the faces of people in the street made me turn, quickly as if to save myself from the sight of them. I had a horror of their piggy vacuity: I tried, experimentally, to look directly at a man from whom I'd instinctively rebounded, and found I'd been right, he was frightful, a normal American man of thirty five, flabby, short haired, and his face formed by an expression like a sore. (Dreamed last night of catching mice in a house under construction, hung them around my neck in groups like long earrings biting my neck. Took them off to kill them, decided I must hammer them dead, and they bit my fingers. Roy was in the dream, rubbing against Jud, which pained me. Uncle Neil was a secret companion. I was swinging very high and could look out over the water. Found a house built on stilts, it seemed I could buy it, but when I looked at it it was unsteady in the air and eaten by termites, and probably couldn't be renovated. The first time I've dreamed of a rotten house, makes me sad.
On the bus there was a little Japanese grandmother with an unwrinkled jawline, a lovely wrinkled brown face, a brown tam, black trousers, spectacles, and black net gloves; she smiled a beautiful smile. Yesterday, on another bus, a tall woman with grey hair swung in. She was carefully dressed in a belted raincoat, had her hair done in a Hollywoodish casual flip, had a big red lipsticked mouth held in a constant but alert half smile as she looked around the bus, her large blue eyes often catching mine. I was ruffled, thought, is she some rich easy-life married woman who eats very well, to look so fine and lithe? When she got off the bus she ran a few steps and put her hands in her pockets; and she'd bent her head down to speak to the old lady next to her. When she was gone I looked back and thought I wished I'd spoken to her, or not been so suspicious. She had presence and perhaps because she isn't easy-life married. I'm unsure of myself and hostile. Even the people who run this hotel are strangely curt to me: the desk manager is always taking his chance to peer into the room. Makes me oddly selfimportant: I'm not what you think, I'm a writer, I'm educated, you must be able to see I'm not a bum. My bum fantasy bites deep, I half believe it literally and then the metaphor becomes frightening. I am a bum, a transient; that was my flash last night. That's the link. Why should Luke be a tame cat (I'm a wild dog and lone / I love to sit and bay the moon / And keep tame folks from sleep) when I wasn't. I was an orphan, he should be an orphan too. He takes to it, drawn down the corridor to other people's rooms. Yet he loved the homey commune; and when I hit him he says Mummy very pathetically and comes to be cuddled. I feel a little mad sometimes, not in my rages, but in my vagueness. I'm forgetful; there's something else too, what is it, a stupidity, a dullness, my mind fails to make connections which are perhaps - as if the hitches had got slightly out of line with the hooks - I think of mechanical models because what I'm talking about is lack of precision, like in a camera, which makes all the difference. Have no clear feelings either. Even the mice biting my neck was not horror. I look to my body for symptoms, and am not sick, but need to be healed - Of Andy, that unholy expense of myself? Of Luke's erosion? Of not working for five months of empty time? Of Roy? This time not of Roy, Roy could almost have cured me, he was so clear - Roy meeting us at the door on the morning we left, his big tears splashing on the steps, old friend; well he's still there and what a trouble he'd be if he were here. Sitting on top of the baggage with Luke. Sometimes I held his knee, sometimes I held Andy's neck. It was a formal farewell, and untrue, because - did Andy know that it couldn't be helped - it was Roy and me and Luke saying goodbye to each other - and Andy was the bodyguard and chauffeur. Andy has his own drama with Betsy, and why should I be ashamed? I am ashamed, but no wonder I couldn't sleep with him. Wonder if he's telling himself the truth yet? I am ashamed. Why do I lie so easily when it's important to be clear. Even to Luke, I lie to him to avoid explanation, or because it doesn't occur to me to tell him the truth. I say to Luke: how do you feel when I'm cross with you? I feel uncomfortable. How do you feel when I'm not cross with you any more? I still feel uncomfortable. When do you feel comfortable then? Only when I'm on boats, and rafts. I loved this sequence because he seemed to be mocking me. He dodges into absurdity when I try to get forgiveness from him. Is he really smarter than I am? What did you do at school? I went outside and crossed the road by myself, an' there was a factory and the mans let me drive a truck by myself. What did they give you to eat at playgroup? The mans gave me a whole lot of ice cream. How I hate controlling Luke: I have no clarity about that. Usually the need to control him seems false and an imposition of situations I despise. Occurs to me to wonder if it's weakness in me, just refusing to be responsible, and just wanting to be left alone. Oh yes no doubt of that; and yet I am conscientious at least about thinking about all sorts of important questions that do not popularly exist - like - oh, these things without popular existence are like dreams; without consensus they vanish - what do I think of all day? Why don't I grasp the questions well enough to decide them, instead of having them again and again as new unsolved questions? What Gopi Krishna says about the energy used by consciousness. In my Emily of New Moon days my consciousness fed me beautiful daydreams, completed thoughts that loved themselves, I lived harmoniously within my myth. For what I am now there is no clear myth I could impersonate. What kind of warrior can a mother be? I have to invent that myth; but if I do it will be my whole work and will I ever have other work, in the cool radiant fields of light and its avatars - as a stone is light's avatar - ? My constellation of women, are they inventing it? Penelope, Sarah, Sal, JoAnn, they don't have any children. Barbara, who's given Noah to Stephen. Will we not have peace with our children until men have learned how to care for children, so they take the mothering responsibility while we are torn by our need to be alone, until we know we're entitled to be alone, and can return? Constellation of women. Realized I could be so strong in that poetry group because Sarah was there and understood me; and she could too! Penelope. I'm shy and want to give you presents, that's childish and wonderful, so I'll trust it and give you presents. Sal: she was stout and vivid next to my fire, and when I told her about my women's commune she said Why are you leaving just now? and I gave her my icon of that smiling missionary woman [Mother Theresa], she took it away with the votive candle still in it. JoAnn showing me her painting of the blond woman, and her hands - the lines on her hand so clear and so simple! Mine so large, complex and unharmonious. Her left hand and right hand identical. Mine very different. Many splits, chains. Look at this handwriting, it's as if two people were there, both disordered. It is a sort of crisis I'm in, full of fears; is my life really so difficult that it's making me weird? Is it sudden growth? Organic disintegration? Maybe I need to break, but it isn't safe now; do I have to strengthen my present mad self? The day at Penelope's house, everybody was crying. That seemed lovely to me. When am I going to be able to cry again? Sie ist, für Ellie, stille, aber es ist auch immer sehr schwer ... Tony I could do with you, you'd make me cry. Who else. - On Hastings going to buy two pairs of boots to make me taller I 'met' - got to within a foot of each other (our paths laid right next like two tramways), before my head pulled my eyes round to halt him - David [Rimmer]; that's one tension resolved, I thought. Gabbled gaily and made sure to be the one to leave - is he too obtuse to notice? - but it woke my body a little, so I could feel that particular hunger around my mouth - that tension I remember from my young girl days when I was more erotic than now - at 6 - and then Luke was happy in the snow, wanted to walk up Pender - I told him the names of the shops, Wo Fat Co, and we got to Monument Park, ran on the grass spongy from the snow, got out my harmonica. A red haired drunk wanted a turn - later on Hastings a goodlooking but very sick yellow-eyed spade who said he was a drummer had a soft try - live dangerously, I thought, and didn't disinfect it.
It was the whales moved me to tears nearly, I loved them so much. I am a true worshipper of something, and when I pursue that in myself it is my right path, and everything else is, really is, sin. Thinking about ambition: what do I want from the best poet: sense of their researched existence, wide openings like coming to the sea where I didn't expect it to be so wide:
Seferis hardly uses adjectives. How to know where the magic resides, how consciousness can give something, research and contemplation, give back something, add something, extend the tao of the thing so the mind doesn't mess it up.
(The train's multiplicity lovely because each goes exactly where the others go, with similar different lots of people in the same groups of carriages.) There's still too much Lucy Maud Montgomery in my style - her feeling is alright but needs to be understated. Why? Just because it's 'feminine'? What's wrong with the rhapsodic mode, how's Sepheris rhapsodic without the mode? Gives the rhapsody to you, makes it your responsibility, c/f Neruda who puts it into his words as well as his pictures? Today I was full of bliss - on Richards, in the doughnut shop, on Burrard looking in dress shop windows, walking around the pond, finding the wide sea, thinking between the pond and the forest, alone underwater with the whales, eating an O Henry, browsing among the icons in the Co-op bookshop, finding two white feathers, fetching Luke from the orange mountains, buying 7-up, thinking about being a poet; thinking. Evoking Lois, Jerry, Penelope, Tony, Mother (making me laugh), JoAnn, Rosalind. - There is a carpeted room with windows along one side, like a living room, but the windows looked into the dim green otherworld underworld underwater of the killer whales' pool. The sunlight I sat in had come through the water, and the whales came to lie in it, two feet from me. I was alone with them: they slid their long bodies along the glass and looked into my eyes with their black sidelong gaze - I was so moved, it was like worshipping god. Why do I always find a water temple to fill myself in? I have to make a film about those whales. Why does making films seem the only proper ceremony to bring them? Wanted to write them a poem, but no it isn't precise enough, I have to be able to say exactly how they look, those pinto creatures, when they are on the far side of their pool and their white spots are exactly the color of the water.
- Thinking about Ashton-Warner Spearpoint, Americans appall her, except for a young man called Carl; she seems an old lady, repetitive, not so sure of herself, and in the end bitter. She says they're empty. The pictures in his mind are part of his mind as an organ is part of his body, as indispensable to the life of his mind as the heart to the body ... His feeling, combusting in imagery, is a functioning organ, which is the reason I call it organic. You hear me talk of organic writing or the organic shape of a morning, and since it is from his feeling that his imagery arises, is born, I call it native imagery ... The presence in his mind of this living imagery I call the third dimension of his personality. release the native imagery of our child and use it for working material native imagery replaced by external: inorganic Dreams are a living picture in the mind generating energy. They are at once direction finders and sources of power. Dreams are a blast from the living imagery exploding with profligacy.. . Yet no dreams combust from imagery which is sedated or dead. Touch the true voice of feeling and it will create its own style and vocabulary. The words which caption the native imagery I call the Key Vocabulary, for they unlock the mind. My imagery remains intact because I never saw anything you could call a book until I was eleven.. . No unskilled teacher invaded the privacy of the house of my mind and took over occupancy. Deprivation makes you dream. Organic work in the morning, cultural skills in the afternoon. Material from the minds of our children in the morning, external material in the afternoon. Discipline: It got me out of bed rubbing my eyes to creep in the dark to the kitchen, turn on the light, make the tea and get out my books... . When the daylight made me put them away, or the first baby waking, the day looked different ahead and there were ideas in it. 'The woman-bred child', the woman-bred boy ... Take a look at the violences in many societies, the sensational assassinations, and you'll find behind them the woman-bred man, with the loveliest manners and politeness. From these solo homes we sometimes receive unsettled children whom no amount of care at school can settle ... our children find at school the man-woman whole, absent at home, and the desired, yearned for, man-presence. - This bit shocks me. The women-bred men I know, Chris Cordeaux, Roy, they're tender, original, and ...? Peter? The father-dominated men I know - Paul, Greg (but Don, Frank). The mother-preferring? Andy, Tony, Ian? Colin, who's matey with his dad, as if a mother. Right. What kind of mothers, what kind of women? The man-woman whole in one person, as in Rosalynd? As I might be. Lovely manners - the lady seems to have a scornful misunderstanding of femininity, when it is her own femininity - the impassioned, personal, concrete commitment to what actually happens - that gives her style and did make her write brilliantly: "I want to know, for the sake of my own life," like Joanna Field, and Mary Caroline Richards. I am a woman-bred woman for that, M was full of dreams, her imagery totally intact thanks to deprivation, repression and sheer vitality of her thick-thighed muscular body. What F had to offer, Evil Epp, was violence, mystery, a vision of confident trading with the outside, his own view of himself as a philosopher studying human nature, an erotic possibility ...? Like a tarot card he could be read, but she wasn't there to be read, she was there to let the primary images educate themselves. Women-bred could mean that. Heide's father-bred and it's the same. More landscape-bred. Women-bred - Lawrence, Rilke I think, someone else said that men get poetic gifts by exclusive imaginative interconnection with gifted mothers. Maybe special boys just have more in common with their mothers; special girls have to feel they transcend their mothers but not necessarily in the direction of their fathers. Sarah, Kathy, Sal? Mafalda? JoAnn's mother-bred. Luke, shaking me out of my book (pulling my hand), Ellie why do people have to die when they get very old? Because they can't get as big as the sky? Because they can't fly like the sky? The gentleness of a bus driver yesterday with an old Chinese woman who couldn't say what she wanted clearly enough. "I'm sorry, I can't understand what you're saying." When she got to her stop she tugged the bell five times, and he said, "Oh Jackson, that's where you want to get off. Now I understand you." And when she got off, smiling and nodding, he said "Goodnight, now." The incident this morning when I was mending my donkey jacket on the bus - the Chinese granny asking for the needle to fix her umbrella. Giving me the lot, to bite off her thread. Big smile full of gold teeth. Slender little women with no flab on their faces, as old people should be. Yeats, poet writing out of antithetical self, what she lacks in herself. Coleridge "Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood." "The more I think, the more I am convinced that Admiration is an essential element of poetical delight." "This is a work of Time / but the Body feels it quicken with me" 1597 nothing affects me much at the moment it happens it either stupefies me / or I am simply indifferent ... - For a Thing at the moment is but a Thing of the moment / it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself thro' the whole multitude of Shapes and Thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged - between wch and it some new Thought is not engendered / this is a work of Time / but the Body feels it quicken with me. Don't understand the force of that - it's in the words, not in his sense. Juxtapose this with The Soul within the Body, can I in any way compare this to the Reflection of the Fire seen thro my window on the solid Wall, seeming of course within the solid wall - I fear, I can make nothing out of it / but why do I always turn away from any interesting Thoughts to do something uninteresting - is it a cowardice of deep Feeling, even tho' pleasurable? Or is it Laziness? I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking - or psychologically my brain-fibres, or the spiritual Light which abides in the brain marrow as visible Light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other smashy matters, is of too general an affinity with all things / and tho' it perceives the difference of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or rather that which is common / bring me two things that seem the very same, & then I am quick enough to shew the difference, even to hair-splitting - but to go on from circle to circle my Concentricals. Use of journal: to catch the attractions, thoughts, which dream-like are too unnamed to remember. Thereby to extend my own named territory - so as not to feel dominated by public language and its politics. Olson: Observation of any kind is, like arguments in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward form. Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his [sic] soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself [sic] between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. Charles Olson 1950 "Projective verse" - Interview with Cloris Leachman: she said she'd never taken a lover because there was none like George, with his language, his special perception. Trudging, I remember Chris Cordeaux: "You have such special access to things." We found a little dog in the thrift shop, a scottie without ears, and with very fierce close-set orange eyes. When we got off the Broadway bus we realized we'd left him behind when we transferred: Luke cried real and not dramatic tears, and I came out of my bored bad temper to really comfort him and feel for him, because he'd lost his child. Gallant small person: he has touchy days sometimes when I'm gay, but today when I scowled on streetcorners and nagged him so that people stared round, he was cheerful and balanced and even ironic, so that I sometimes had to smile in spite of my self indulgent bad temper. He found a white catamaran on Kitsilano Beach, climbed into it, sat for a long time on the front of it where it flew up off the sand as if balanced on a wave under the stern. This is a flying boat, he said. I sat on a log at a distance, while he had his own encounters with people who smiled at him. Hotel Europe Annie gave him a quarter this morning, when he sweetly showed her his penny. The way the bartender threw out a bum: pushed him in his chair to the door, swiftly as if in a wheelchair, and there Annie tenderly hoisted him out and closed the door after him. Stuart's eyes when he'd been "on the drink all day" and smelled of vanilla essence - bleached white, as if turned inside out. His thin body which sags forward at the belt, as if the spine is soft. - [February Powell Rooms] Most of my dreams have little feeling in them and hardly ever touch me. It's years since I dreamed of an immanent lover, and do I ever dream of Luke? I dream about Roy and always have since before - His adolescent dreams about seducing girls: applying leverage to people in a way that still doesn't occur to me. In Luke it is a natural gift: he knows what to do. I suppose I do too - like, going to see Bergeron, being shocked to discover myself laughing flatteringly at something he said. When I realized what I'd done it was as if a tide had suddenly withdrawn and I looked around dismayed at a vast area of self-betrayal which is my bedrock - part of my bedrock, bed-sand anyway: how I do things, how I effect things. When I went to see him what I'd felt myself armed with was, most important, my appearance - I'd worn jeans and my green silk, so's to be both exotic and plain, and my donkey jacket, and my hair standing up bushy because of the snow - I intended to look fierce, strong and intelligent - I intended to be direct, ironical, and crisp, like a brilliant filmmaker making her own uncompromising way etc. B did look twice from the moment he saw me on the stairs, I felt the blaze was working. Maybe the flattering girl marries the warrior persona although - bah! I am the warrior too, and would have amazon marry the mothering man. Stephen [Martineau] was really a new card in my tarot. Penelope and Stephen neighbouring. This Key Vocabulary, tarot, the politics that live in it, self criticism toward new society has to break so much that supports - as with Roy, I was living in an enchanted circle full of power but corrupt. Abundant life would be the possibility of living inside those circles - fairy rings, toadstool rings - without contradictions. Mate, child, work, house, journey, friend, teacher, beast, beauty, group, - I'm your best friend because I'm your daddy, Ellie. I'm not the daddy of you Ellie, I'm the daddy of this little fish, I'm the daddy dolfish and you're the mommy dolfish, and this is our little child, and we have to take good care of him Where's our child dolfin gone? I think he's snuggling between my legs. Yes he's snuggling your fanny, he's drinking milk from your fanny. There's no milk in my fanny, you pudding. There's no milk in your tits either, but 'tend there is. The one and a half inch plastic dolphin sucks at my real nipples (I unbutton the plaid shirt) while Luke makes sucking noises. Then Luke takes him off, comes back, shows his empty hands, says Something's happened to our child Ellie! What? Something came alone, a crane, and dug a hole and put him in. Well quick go dig him out! His language is never foolish. Just now he said, Our child is gone again. I said, He must be buried again, did you look? Luke says nothing. My eye accidentally (I am thinking about poetry) reaches the flowers on the window sill. Our child the dolphin is stuck into the nose of a daffodil and only his white tail is showing. I begin to laugh, Luke you know you are bloody brilliant! He sticks a lego rail into the nose of another daffodil. What else is brilliant Ellie? - Tell me 'bout that nursery rhyme about curves and waves. -
- Hello Miriam Xios: there's a difficulty I have finding my imaginary teacher (Lessing, Lessing's She), and I don't know why I need another name. The other name is for public works, it's to protect me from shame, so I can publish, mark. Miriam Xios is my robot, who goes out into dangerous garbage to mail my letters. Poetry is a style of will. I'm lonesome for my house, mine, the key opening it, the telephone with people on it wanting to speak to me, why have I come to this provincial place where
|