| dames rocket 1 part 3 - 1975 march - april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[March 1975] Well Paul Kinsella. I've found my reader, how clear and sweet you were today. Lately we've met in tears, lately we've told each other some secrets and at the end of Sunday my belly's full of honey for you. Paul Kinsella, yes I wanted some body who could talk. Ah, you're right little Paul, these days you've been nothing but accurate. We spent the day in harmony, sun came through the curtains, perhaps it is the new harmony of the season, or the wonderful new grace of my room: on Friday we looked at it by candlelight, sat quietly in bed and saw the south wall turned into an exterior, rocking chair on the verandah, blue light falling out of the tall window through a cotton curtain. Yellowness of the candlelight, my shades of white, substantial light at various degrees of substantialization - then the clear red of poinsettia and blanket, yellow and orange of rug. The dresser, pollen yellow-brown tassels hanging heavily. Blue window light reflected in it. Now, in this near dark, because of the angle of the sun, the mirror's beveled edge is prisming pale broken colors - blue, violet, pale yellow, light from pink and blue clouds, an old mirror, which clarifies and hardens what it sees. I am not acquainted with myself in it yet, but Paul and I imagined the room behind my wall, which is like this room. then the room adjacent on the other side, the room which is thrown out the west window and which now has a mirrored wall as its west wall. Turning on the light has darkened the windows. I came into the room through the shut door and there was Paul sitting against the wall, and he had been crying. Dear little Paul why were you crying? Secretly. "You write very movingly sometimes. It is painful to be discovering you." It was because of my poem about Jud, and not because of the fairytale, as he wanted me to believe. It touched me to believe that. It was because of "This is my man, see how I come to him." We lie a little, both of us, I about Roy and he about Ann. But what I began to believe is that we can stop, and we can acknowledge our secrets, because - oh yes Paul, I'm sure you shine like this with everybody, you light up toward people, I don't want to hear that - but I believe you you silvertongued Irish Paul, I believe your flatteries because - no, I believe them when I feel them. And the other - the way I look ashamed sometimes because I don't believe you. I mistrust your smile; yet, you know Paul Kinsella ("I want you to be madly in love with me, and I'll be madly in love with you too, and you'll bloom") you needn't love me single-mindedly because - well, I'd like to be clear with you - but I don't love you single-minded yet, and won't because you are
Our quarrel about Luke, then after spending time in defense, I attacked. I said "But Andy Moostach really liked him" and began to sob - and then explained all I miss, about sharing Luke and not having to dislike my mothering self. At the end he was hurt, silenced, blanked, lost. I snuggled him a little. He went out for a while. Oh, on Friday night: the way I pressed myself along him, warm on shins, thighs, belly, chest, arms, and fell asleep slowly almost consciously. What do we talk about all day: we tell stories out of our past lives, we tell happy things usually - so much to know - we describe what goes on between us almost immediately after it happens. Sometimes we get carried into monologues - yesterday he was; today he wasn't - we tell what we've decided about each other in the time between our last analyses - we play with our perceptions, elaborate - we test out pain on each other - he says Oh you're gorgeous - he told me the story, as we walked from Hastings in the cold, of how he almost died of drinking river water, and Concepta maybe saved him, he was much younger than she, only fifteen or sixteen, but she let him think he had a chance: a buxom night nurse from Sligo. One of his 'bad thoughts' is that I bring out the hysteria in him: I tell him that's one of mine about him. When I cried there was a stream of mucous from each of my nostrils to my mouth, I was proud of it. The way he tells me what I want to hear and doesn't tell me what I don't want to hear. Sinning against himself, and it makes him feel bad. At least you know it. I love the idea of a full size window sunk into an inner wall, opposite a west window maybe, where the panes of the fully working sash window would be replaced by a mirror. - This is the day I forgot Luke on the bus, telephoned the bus company when the sky was suffused with peach pink light for half its hemisphere. We went to the PNE with the crowd going to the Floyd. - Tonight Luke said, as we were saying oh universe, "An' the day before, when I got lost" and I said "Oh yes thank you for helping me find Luke." Luke said "But I didn't want you to find me." "But I wanted to know where you were! Did you want to never be able to come home?" "I could live someplace else." "But I would want to know where you were!" "I would send you my address." "But I want you to live with me, because I love you!" (Ow-w, but if I'm forbidden to say that?) "I don't like you." "Why don't you like me?" (Squirms.) "Because you don't buy me anything, like sweets when it isn't the proper day." His eyes fill, he looks very hurt. What's it about. Scares me. Is it going to be possible, to have him grow up not disliking me? My need to get away from him, my irritation with the daily routines of him. The way I yell to ease my itch - will he forgive me, will I be enough other things to win him? Can I accept him refusing me? I refuse him so often. Fight and love, scream and smile, pinch and cuddle. Saying, "Can I go back there sometime, and be their boy?" Lucy and Neil! Is there another right attitude I could have, that would make the difference. He wants to live with a daddy; I don't want to live with a daddy. He wants to be affluent; I don't want to work! He wants candy, pop, ice cream, television, every day. He doesn't want to dress himself. (Madeleine telling about her friend's cruelty to her children: Marianne.) But in the morning he likes to hug me. - This was the day I got the little cat. Began to purr as I began to write. Porpoise Gooseberry. Roots - on a brilliant day, trees are rooted into the light by their shadows. After sunset the sky is very light behind the mountains, as if another country is dammed behind them. Unbroken south wall, featureless in that light; dark blue, and matte. The Western Conference women's meeting. - A long Saturday - Paul the meat grinder, wake up resenting him, breakfast, catatonia, I don't want to waste myself recording it, except Luke giving me a lot of kisses because I was sad ("You must have tears on your face" he shouts, sitting shitting when I come in for kleenex to wipe my face), then said "Come on Paul we should leave her alone for a while and go to the store." I reject / am angry with all Paul said and did last night and this morning. Angry because none of it seemed real to me. It has got to be ugly, I'm disappointed. I'm mourning. I'm relieved, I'm afraid maybe it hasn't? Ian and his hysterics, how he wore me out. Paul is getting to be like that, old family quarrels, I don't know, catatonia my willful refusal. All the ghosts came: Ian, Peter, Roy, Andy; Tony to whom I fled, but doubtfully. - The little cat's wonderful burble, a squeak as it runs into the kitchen. When it walks its two pairs of white legs like two ballerinas walking in white tights. Opening First and last notebooks and finding messages about friendship increasing the joy of loneliness and about not naming your longings at the easiest level. - The danger is they may be answered there. - Having supper at Colette's house [Colette French of the Makara collective], Colette an elegant wraith. The new baby (Robin) and Janine; the ex-airhostess with 5 children half time - Moira - Sarah and Sibhion [Josie Cook's daughter]. The big woman sawing out leafs for the table. Have to maybe get rid of Paul, it's shallow and false, ie I don't love - he doesn't either, the arbitrariness - why this connection rather than any other? The constant reassurance. Do I ask for it, yes I do, as constantly. What else is there to do. We get bored. I don't like his face. I like the profile, but his face has a babyish quality. I'm beginning to see him as something soft, squishy. How do people marry? How do they bear the revulsion. Body-mind excess. Glut. Gluttony. "Each tells the other of a dream they have had. It proves to be the same dream." Tony. How by making a leap I gave myself a longtime friend and those days at his windows. His city island, Walmer Road, pigeons, horses, the sounds of birds singing late, Sunday morning kids, the dairyman next to the barber. Will I ever really forget it, so it will be necessary for me to note it now, the bright days of autumn and January. Tony I do want to know you becoming an old man. - "There were two people coming toward me, really wrecked in their faces, as if by drink. When they passed me, their eyes were very bright, they were talking animatedly, and there was something very alive about them. The woman was holding the man's arm. When I turned around to look after them the woman was ducking a little as she walked, the way you sometimes do. I took it as a sign that I should come." My rant about the ugly word 'relationship,' jam tart - "knowing when to say, right, that's the end of the jam tart, now it's the second phase and we will be friends." "That sounded like a proclamation." "Always the same, I seem to get into it in order to get to know somebody and then I end up fighting to get out of the jam." Pleased with my picture. But it was Paul who was gallant this morning, with Rudy and Luke, when I didn't have any courtesy for him. When he's balanced he holds it very well. "I have a feeling as if I bungled it." His confession about the girl, he said it seemed to be that that sparked off the irrational part of the weekend - I said maybe, but it was the form of it and not the content. It touched a spring that shocked me into stone-density. - Dreamed a Chabrol movie about disappearance of some fuel oil in a tank, looking for suspects on the street. Extremely full rich detail, I was in it as assistant to the detective who questioned 4 violent boys first in a car then at an open counter on the street. A perfume? or candy counter. (Earlier dream spilled perfume in a box of my belongings - preparation for a journey.) Attention to one of the boys trying to steal back his deposit money. A woman leaving her card, she was a friend of mine and startled the detective, she was collecting stories for pulp fiction. Music during the scene is African rhythms. At the end the things are released to try to get a suite together for pranks in a hotel - the detective, fatherly, offers to pay - disappearance down into the river - the thugs pretend to move toward the hotel, leaving me - "Madeleine" - behind. The thugs push me after them (?) in order to be able to go toward the river - where the boat and the oil are - themselves. I have been used as a ruse of some kind; to draw the boys - the detective waiting around the corner shouts something about a virgin - boys are I presume captured. There may be a gunshot. An explanation of the term virgin is given on the screen - first time I am not in the movie - a splat of red on the upper right corner, like a tomato being thrown, directorial voice says word virgin evokes a gush of blood - leave the movie with a friend, look - no - end scenes of movie are camera movement sideways that rushes away more and more quickly as on a train. Look around excited - say what a good movie, I'd been completely absorbed in it, walk out with a friend who finds the copy of a book on Chabrol I'd lost - I go back to tell her in my excitement that the movie was about rhythms. It is at this point that I realize I am dreaming. - Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind and falsifies the memory, but the absurd exercises the mind and makes the memory work. Jarry Marianne Moore on The Making of Americans: By this epic of ourselves we are reminded of certain early German engravings in which Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel stand with every known animal wild and domestic, under a large tree, by a river. "Where literature is no longer cursive" Stein - The artist who concedes nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing, accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every hand. 1874-1946 patient and progressive deintellectualization the vitality of her free transcription of experience She always seemed to like her own fat anyway and that usually helps other people to accept it. Vico - In civilized epochs poetry can only be written by those who have the capacity to suspend the operation of the intellect. Read - That love of the concrete which has characterized the art of Europe for centuries is deliberately renounced. Jacqueline Auriol gueulle cassée, broken face, reconstituted little by little. When it was reformed it was no longer the face she knew, there was some family resemblance but now she felt she had to model it from within. (Christie's broken face, the smashed bone that grew back. Jud cutting her hair off, radiance she had or seemed to have for a while after that.) She modeled it by becoming a test pilot, she speaks of flying always as joy - story of her first death, when she just pulled out of something at the last moment, landed an airplane. And I landed with a plane that was all out of true .... The terrible pressures to which it had been subjected had turned it into a kind of solidified spin. To land I had to put the controls in positions in which one simply does not put them. Like turning the steering wheel of a car to the left in order to go to the right. Her account of the celebration with her husband, children and the mechanics and ground control. How she was the only one, excited and talkative, wanting to share her revelation, who could celebrate because she was the only one who'd had the experience. - "Mum, my name is gonna be Christie Chrustie okay, and I live with my baby." - the ritual of the slaughterer before an animal is killed in the kosher manner. Communicating with the victim, the killer may tranquilize it into a quiet death, to prevent its death from having a residue of 'chemical fear' disagreeable to the palate possibility that plants and succulent fruits might wish to be eaten, but only in a sort of loving ritual, with a real communication between the eater and the eaten Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird 1973 The secret life of plants Harper & Row Calls it primary perception, ie senses as secondary. a recognizable pattern in the graph whenever a plant was witnessing the death of some living tissue ie they react even to the death of bacteria some sort of total memory in the single cell ie the brain may be a switching mechanism, not necessarily a memory storage organ Tissue that is unhealthy or has begun to die no longer acts as a remote stimulus, is no longer capable of transmitting some type of warning. An unfertilized egg, got polygraph reading with rhythm of heartbeats in a chicken embryo, 160-170 beats per minute, same as embryos 4 days old. Concentration can keep a leaf green. Finding plants that are sensitive by feel. Indians put their back to a pine tree. We can get into plants and look around. Hashimoto's talking cactus - the voiceprints - electronic modulations of human voice - process reversed, graph tracings of plant transformed to sound. Question, when thought, psi-factor, can regulate so many things, why do we have 'physical' interrelation? Why do we have senses? Bose - stress and recovery curves the same for metal, plants and animal muscle. Chloroformed a pine tree in order to transplant it. - If plants can breathe, digest and move without lungs, stomach or muscle why can't we - plants have reflex arcs ie nervous systems without nerves. At death plants throw off a huge electric force - "Five hundred green peas could develop five hundred volts, enough to fulminate a cook but for the fact that peas are seldom connected in series." Praise Hegel. In countless plants, growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses, each pulse exhibiting a rapid uplift and then a slower partial recoil of about a fourth of the distance gained. Growth in some plants could be retarded and even halted by merely touching them, and in others rough handling stimulated growth, especially if they were sluggish or morose. My first work in the region of invisible lights made me realize how in the midst of luminous ocean we stood almost blind. Just as in following lights from visible to invisible our range of investigation transcends our physical sight, so also the problem of the great mystery of Life and Death is brought a little nearer solution, when, in the realm of the Living, we pass from the Voiced to the Unvoiced. - Linneus' system is basically a sexual system. Goethe: Paracelsus, Boehme, Bruno, Spinoza, Gottfriend Arnold would tranquilize himself at night by visualizing the entire cycle of the plant from seed to seed Substantial form, Urorganismus. Aristotle called soul, Proclus called demon, medieval philosophers called elementary spirits. Goethe: When we see that the vertical system is definitely male and the spiral definitely female, we will be able to conceive of all vegetation as androgynous from the root up. In the course of the transformation of growth the two systems are separated and take opposite courses to be reunited on a higher level. Lehr on G: physical stream must suffer discontinuity at certain intervals. In the case of the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the breaking asunder of the male and female growth principles. When they have reunited, the type begins to abandon either the old plant or at least part of it, in order to concentrate on the tiny seed. Fechner's story of the flower's soul emerging and hanging above it. "Believing itself invisible, it was quite surprised when a little child appeared." Comparative anatomy of the angels! Fechner - spiritual nerves in the universe, interconnection of celestial bodies, not with 'long ropes' but with a unified web of light, gravity and forces as yet unknown. Subsonic - sonic - ultrasonic - forms continuum with thermal To be buried, without a box, under a young tree knowing the tree would eventually and with pleasure lap up nearly every bit of you. Zend avesta The journal does not discriminate quite so much between mine and theirs (as formerly). Plants use other beings to transfer sexual substance - we could do that. Burbank after the earthquake "... was less amazed than his fellow townsmen, though careful not to broach the subject directly in public, surmising that his communing with the forces of nature and the cosmos and his success with plants might well have protected his greenhouse." In all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection. The child to have a good nervous system, by play and contact with nature. Growing toward Haydn and away from rock! Toward fiddles away from drums. Loved Bach, loved Shankar even more and liked Ellington. Bach lived by attraction principle, most of these people did. continuous low hum of 3,000 cycles Cyril Meir Scott, Theosophist composer - purpose of dissonant music is to break up thought forms, which, settling over whole countries and people, turn them stagnant with lethargy or rampant with madness. Relation of the octave, intervals, to forms of plants, solar systems Rosicrucians
It's been dawning in me that I may not have to live my life outside love after all. Everyone receives their spiritual name at some point and only then can they work. What does 'Miriam' mean? - The mystery of why Paul and I suddenly have sundered, from one week to another. I feel like the leaf that grows its scar before it falls. It falls when the scar is finished, without pain. The way my mind is different now, from when I was eighteen, is essentially that there are things now I refuse to think: no, I will not lend myself to that. So, especially in my wrong romances I refuse to detail, and gossip, what happens between myself and the fucker - no, enough that it happened, I will not elaborate or memorize it, let it sink. But. What is there to learn. I'm glad to be alone. Speaking to Paul I was revolted by the reconnection although my curiosity was satisfied, and my guilt too. What is there to learn. Do I mean to be celibate? It is like my revolt from Andy, for whom I feel such kinship and tenderness now. After a short time sex seems to become gross, I lose all my willingness to let myself go in it; it begins to seem a messy eating of each other. The other early moment of it, lying belly to belly with Andy - that was right, androgynous, angelic and ecstatic. I want it only to be ecstatic, and as it fumbles in strangeness at the beginning it is a form of ecstasy. Ugly sex - Peter - nearly everyone, at some time. There's Tony the exception, and that because? When people are married do they break through that barrier? Or does it seem ugly to me because I'm physically depleted somehow? Attenuated? Have I something else to do? - What I want: If your prayer is sincere, there will be every time you pray a new feeling containing an idea in it, an idea you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage; you will then understand that prayer is education. My friends, ask God for gladness. What grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds; if that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, then what has grown up in you will also die. Then you will become indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. [Father Zosima in Dostoevsky 1880 The brothers Karamazov] - I want:
- Trust myself to this bed every night, this room reflecting, no reflecting nothing, this room flattened to its walls, this ordered snowy room, this room without a lover visiting it, this room no one visits, this room whose order begins to be its ceremony. I must move the glass from the dresser, the pear white and the pink flowers must be there by themselves. Could I begin to grow as in my Sexsmith year. Could I dare to refuse for good. The cheerfulness of nuns / the plump flesh of mothers. When I trust myself to this bed on the floor, cornered with my lamp, the only light in the house, I feel myself on a narrow shelf in darkness. Luke murmers upstairs in the dark. He has lain himself down and turned his own light off. We have roosted far from the city we knew. We are learning the geography of our neighbourhood, there is a way to walk to school where we can see a calf in a barn, and then the horses on the track. The bridges, the opening in the mountains: the knees, the gates, magnified cleft like the oracle's cleft at Delphi. The inlet, the narrows. When I trust myself to my narrow corner of light I feel familiar surprize, here I am alive, still waiting. I turn the light off early, I think I'm beginning to be happy. Wednesday morning, the asphalt mirroring sky in rippled sheets, yes the smells, we can walk slowly across the fairground, no one challenges us, it's our site, we imagined a circus there. Luke is so little. To him every tower, every octopus and roller coaster must be heightened by a factor of x2. Often he sings loudly. This afternoon I saw him far behind me wearing the paper Indian chief's hat, stabbing with his three sections of yellow folding ruler. On the bus this morning, when I was wearing the forties hat for the rain (Luke's mum has a funny hat on) a young man with a fine, white face and clear eyes wanted to speak to me - a Christian, from the Prairies! - Little Jennifer laying her head against me, as Luke drove us vigorously through the bush in our camper van. Yuko lying cooking on a piece of board, a dead deer, tickled on her slim tummy when --- sliced her up. That population of children. Zahra. Ali. Afti. Yuko. Jennifer. Bobby-Lynn, Caroline, Joyce, Peter, Adrian, Nicole, Danny, Jonathan, Luke, Candy, Yvonne. Their beautiful eyes. Children haven't charmed me for a long time but these children are beginning to. Mrs Mackie wringing her hands. [This in a church daycare near the PNE.] I do wait for someone to walk up the stairs, I wait to be tested by one of the forms of violence in this neighbourhood. I am conscious of being single and 'unprotected,' illegitimate. The house is too big. When I go to my workroom on the catwalk along the stairs it is like going to an outbuilding. My moves in the house are mostly symbolic. I'm declaring intentions, I'm calming myself. The notion that for a year I must fast from reading, I must put out. I must sent out some reports. My dreams have become long stories. Last night I pulled long splinters out of my right sole, they had made me stink. What is the work, two consciences. What is the work
Michael Carmichael was in a dream last night, I saw him for the first time, a small wiry monkey child with a dark pinched intensely intelligent face that resembled Richard's. - In 1859 an issue of the London Gardener's Chronicle published a report of light flashes passing from one scarlet verbena to another and noted that the phenomenon could best be seen during crepuscular periods when a thunderstorm approached after a long spell of dry weather. This validated an observation of Goethe's that the flowers of oriental poppies could be seen flashing at dusk. Plants as lightning rods, more so further north Hang metal to plants, bright tin - Christmas tree ornaments. Plant seeds with long end pointing north. Activator - lodestone - magnetized ferrous oxide. Cells are oscillating circuits - disease is war of vibration, radiation, in which My geraniums flourishing in their metal pot. Ravitz with Burr's voltmeter was able to measure the depths of hypnosis - "went on to the not surprising conclusion that all humans are in hypnotic states most of the time, even when wide awake." "subatomic or protoplasmic energy" Moss - "at whatever frequency we take a picture, we are resonating, with one particular aspect of the material" Might be coming from "whatever is present prior to the formation of solid matter." So how to get properly magnetized? My time capsule. Pulsations slower in older people than in children. Hunza diet is grain, vegetables and fruits, unpasteurized goat milk and butter. Disease at the molecular level, not cellular. Antidotes canceling radiationally. "energy obeying some of the laws of electricity but not all of them, and some of the laws of optics, but not all of them" - At the movies, the b/w film of the old folks and their things, all the icons of women, the drowned mouse, its lovely silence, then the young man in a wool hat, just for a moment, that had a quality. Thought I could make films of people in their silence, like watching Wain [Ewing] watch the movie, his slightly dished face, his solitude, his privacy, little smiles. His look of childish loneliness. Ian MacIntosh. - "Danny at my school, he doesn't say rediclius, he says redicius." - Ian MacIntosh, I expect you to remember me, but I'm uncertain - I have a completely ephemeral connection with you, that is, I've spoken perhaps a sentence to you, smiled at you once, felt your gaze like a steel rod on the back of my head: no it was never ephemeral, what I mean is that I'm not certain you were as aware of it or as interested in it as I was. You may have misunderstood it. Whatever it consists of that bond isn't ephemeral, but so direct and so powerful it's isolated me wide awake in a field of people: your presence. I didn't know what to do with it. Swiveling on my heels, slam, there I am in your eyes, and not able to rejoice: there are no forms for this meeting. Above all I don't want to have it exist as a vague and customary conversation. Will I really never see you again? Why does my life have that flare of something - in it - that sudden wakefulness, focus, that flare like a blowtorch directed unmistakably toward you, without context without permission (without development). Unconfirmed attraction, round like a period on a page. Such a blaze and nothing to be done with it. My life continues among its confirmed connections, none of them lately have had that underground blessing of heat. I know your name. Wonder if you went to the trouble to know mine. In your man's world, work, fatherhood, household, do you notice when your own attention is pulled round as if dowsed? Is that history for you? Is there any way I can call you? Will there be a time when I'll know what to do with you? Was that a moment's call, which if answered too late is no call? It's not the first time. There's Carmichael. It's not uncommon. It's love of course. But what do we do with it. Speak it? Beloved; alas, Beloved! - Despite resolutions not to read, I'm truant, with Luke, in Sylvia Ashton-Warner, drinking Turkish coffee with the tulip's water in front of me like blue-ish ice full of a universe of starry daylight bubbles. It's raining outside, on my new planting. I'm glad, thinking of the seeds that won't unlock if they're hot and dry. Luke in the living room talking to the cat. I'm in love with him today. Ashton-Warner making me think of unruly people, Olivia and Roy. I couldn't breathe without love in the air. I'd choke. I ceased to exist when not in love. The radiance within blotted out so that nothing would happen inside, nothing exploded into action ... never pursued a thought without the motivation of trying to make someone love me ... hardest of all to expose to you is the violence that was in my character. Rattle, bang, whisper. Letters. Her husband. Elias and Christina, Christina saying "It's so painful to love somebody so much you want to be them." In my journals, the passion, the root-deep certainty, of me for Roy. Thinking of it as trauma, so that Paul's little desolation troubles me really not at all: shook my heartwood, blasted me, and it was when I refused him - because of his brutality - that the real damage - it was teaching myself not to love him that damaged. I dream about Elias, I don't dream like that about Roy, I've diminished, demolished him, I wonder if to reconstruct myself I have to reconstruct him. (Dreamed of him drunk asking for money.) When I didn't teach and had no babies I hardly lifted a brush. Hardly did a thing. The need to study, to do, to make, to think, arises from being married. I need to be married to work. She - like Lessing, Joanna Field - thinks about managing her energy. Before he left Saul said that my rising early in the morning at home to my books was different from work in the evening .... He went further and said it was prayer. The thing about A-W and K, and about me with Roy - being so interested in the shifts of the equation. Ellie-Tony over Tony-Ellie, as he put it. - Hey Paul, Paul Kinsella: suits you to look wan, unshaven, thin and sad. Suits you, hugging you for just a minute while it was raining, and then Luke bulldozed between. I like seeing you behind your desk directing yr coworkers. "I know that when I felt included in your affections I was attracted by very peaceful images of study and hard work. Making love left me with visions of warm oranges and fruit in wooden boxes outside a store, but talking to you was always to be in a room with tall windows and a quiet desk." "It's a fright in the womb: I know that I am frightened and that my stomach had these strange feelings, that you know of." Seems to me your abortion out of ruby matrix needs no reply from me for a while: it shouldn't be half done. What does it have to do with me anyway. I feel a sort of tenderness for you that interests me, when you hold back. The love that interests me is my own. There was a wrong balance, you pressed me into a blankness that was wrong, corrupt, for me, an emptiness of flattery. Oh do I mean you should play hard to get, not at all, oh no, but that you mustn't be so quick to give yourself into the impersonal dynamic without criticizing it; the ugly fantasies you have of how I am unfaithful and you go away. How hard I felt after that. No no don't shrink voluntarily into that infantish dwarf with toddling legs and a creased face, flattering his mother in a way that even in Luke is revolting. I don't have a chance to respect you. You are so quick to feel sorry for yourself. Am I sorry to make you cry? I've survived so much worse. It wasn't so bad. It was hard. Why should I tell you - Paul, Paul - what's for you to find out. Your chasm, your dead-end rails, what can the hazarded adjectives of my dislike have to do with that? Liebster Gott wann werd' ich sterben. [Bach cantata 8] O darling god sez A-W. Sex, no, that is for only the strongest magicians, I am not yet one of them, Tony Nesbit is the only one, Tony Nesbit who has never been in love, Tony drunk or sober, inhabited with such a presence, and taking full responsibility. I have to feel I am in good hands, for my loving nature to be free. That is how it is. Some important respect is missing. What am I asking for. For you to take yourself seriously in some way you don't. Not with women perhaps. Stop flattering people. Mother-dominated men. Real men. What's that - no all I mean again and again is Tony's authority. - After all I am ready to tell you what you need to change. Was it just luck, Tony's criticism. No no it was his being, he judges everything. My intransigent critic needs a friend. To judge me is to take my life seriously. Can be. To flatter me is to exploit and cozen. Something much more strenuous. - Right. You are self indulgent, indolent, corrupt. You are too smart for what you do? No you write some serious articles. But but you smudge yourself you are too willing to lend yourself and to please, but exploitively, not in real self revelation, without that sweet core to be given. Or maybe yes. Something cheap about you. Maybe you seem so superficial because you don't have any real connections. You're not a father, you're an old boy. You work but not seriously. You are half born. Do you have any drive. See I am judging you as myself. Where's your flint - petulance is something else. - Gardening concentrating on work, shovel by shovel, imagining the root patterns and preferences of various plants so I can put them in their right places. Speaking to the earthworms. When I dig I wear the yellow gloves, big hands. But then I take them off and cultivate the bed with my strong thumbs, then harrow it by hand, feeling out the stones. Breaking lumps. Fingerholes to drop beet seeds crinkled in. A lot of spirit in those beds, if my hands can leave it there. My body, strong peasant body, was delighted, lightened, by the heavy work. It needs more. Practical work is so good for me. Remember how it clears me. - Today, this Saturday, inside: cleaning, a few small shapes adjusted in the house, great creative joy in the small brilliances which have suggested themselves, last week's disorder shaping itself toward today's tulips, red and pink at windows, the wood closing one wall in the kitchen in just the right way - bringing the window alive. The green mirror in the bathroom, mass of shiny green leaves next to it. Fire in the front room an ember in the dark, two four-and-a-half-year-old children sleeping there, Luke on the floor, arms out, cat asleep at his shoulder. Tara asleep in the same posture, both bare-shouldered. Striped light in the venetian blind. Windows. I was in the kitchen looking through the drawer full of magazine pictures, the wind was clashing bamboo chimes at the back door, two red geraniums, and a spray of that brilliant pink hedge blossom shining out at the polished black window - a sound came on the wind, a crack and then a roar as of a crowd, repeated several times. I opened the door to look toward the Colosseum, was it a hockey game? Sound was there outside, but still mysterious. No clues from the lit back porches on either side of our black alley. I closed the door behind me feeling the sound, the pleasure of the children today, all the astonishing images, feeling amazed life is so strong, surprising - ah, here I am, look at this room, look at that black wet continuous outside, robust white clouds solid as snow streaming out of creases in the mountains. Yes and I do miss you Paul but I wouldn't trade this singleminded right happiness. Nonono as Luke says. Luke's houses he's making. One after another houses, plans. My dream of making this house a studio. Strengthening something here. A projector in the basement. Want to really build a sash window. This house is beginning to seed in me. We would come down to a long table to talk about our images. Workhouse. Women's workhouse. Ooh it could feed this town. It could ripple out. My relation to children is changing wonderfully: there's comfortable pleasure now, delight in the forms of them. This house is being good to me, I even look healthy. Just need to work more. Enterprise. Enter/prise. I'm prizing children. Told Luke and Tara a story about Porpoise Gooseberry slowly, asleep in front of the fire, growing big as a lion and loud as a train. He was very handsome with four white legs like two ballet dancers, stripes, some black and some grey, he was soft and very pretty, but he was big as a big lion and loud as a train. Luke and Tara say he is frightening. I tell him he must stay out of the house if he is so big. He says he likes to be big because everyone treats him with Re-spect. Luke says he understands that. Tara says she understands that. I say Okay, but you have to live in the garage. We fix it for him and he is a Watchcat who keeps out bad people who'd take my marble, and he's glad to stay big, an' everyone treats him with Re-spect. Pleasure of the stories that wind out of nowhere. The Tato stories Luke likes. Big Tato and Little Tato. - "What's to stop me from picking up the telephone" he said. At this moment A.Moostash telephones me, the leafy abutilon and diamonds of matting, a breeze through open windows. - Clean windows in the front room, a spare window-square of evening light on the edge of the last in the row. It has branches in it. The blue mountains have clouds at the top, three trees across the road have light lining their branches. Smoke moving the same tone as the mountains at their various distances, blowing east. Fire's snapping, it's another world, its orange cavity. The already pale sunlight fades abruptly, everything fades, the smoke is moving faster. Sunday. Sparks running up the chimney. Restless and lonely, a little ration of contact with people is enough, but lacking it - One night I telephoned Andy, the telephone rang but wasn't answered. I sat in the dark looking at the brilliant rectangle of mirror and the curtained rectangle of window frightened thrilled dilated, my telephone ringing in London, 485-8166, in my living room, not answered because I'm not there but here sitting in my bed looking in fright at three windows; then, the next time, Andy said Ellie! He was eating an egg, dressed for Friday morning while I was preparing for the night prior to it. Krohn's disease: he drove himself to the hospital and they cut him open. Was going to say the fire loves cedarwood but fire of course is only cedarwood loving to burn. - Sleeping restlessly before the Western Conference meeting, I dreamed another variation of the discovery dream: in our childhood house, I look into the attic which I have reasons to believe is empty, there are things strewn in it, I let myself down into it, my foot breaks through and I discover a secret suite of rooms between the house ceiling and the attic floor - it's furnished and in use, Mother is there, she mentions Uncle Willie; in another part of the dream I am walking in black, rather selfimportantly weeping, Bob Driediger asks why, I say my friend is very ill and may die, he says, I thought it must be something like that. More, being with people, the dying girl in the basement? of another house, guarded. I feel I should pray for her, but don't know when to do it. Another area of the dream. I am in a dark house talking to Rosalynd on the phone, she says distraughtly that Roy is - something I can't hear - there's radio music on the line, she says, Don't you know the radio on the line means - something alarming - somebody's listening? At that moment Roy appears at the door, from England. - This absence is making me feel Paul's qualities. Tasks:
- House of Study "the name of man's secret is God" "Why do you cry? I am leaving by one door only to enter by another." "The earth is full of things that permit man to acquire a partnership with god." Andy as Hassid: "literally: fervent, pious. One who acts out of love, with tenderness." Hasid, Hassidim - lovers of god. Baal Shem - master of the name, has power over beings and things by knowing their true name; if the power used to bring beings closer to God, becomes Master of the Good Name. "When one feels like shouting and doesn't, that is when one truly shouts." Prison becoming sanctuary. A parable: The Midrash tells the episode of the traveler who loses his way in the forest. He sees a castle in flames. It's an empty castle, thinks the traveler. Suddenly he hears a voice crying "Help, help me, I am the owner of the castle!" And the Rebbe repeats: "The castle is ablaze, the forest is aburning, and the owner cries for help; what does it mean? That the castle is not empty, and that there is an owner." And the Rebbe began to tremble and all those present trembled with him. innate releaser mechanisms The releaser - a crude signal - fish respond to crude dummies showing relevant releaser characteristics.
Jacob fought an angel, the angel was a being who fought just hard enough to test him hard and all night long, and then let him win. - The comparative anatomy of angels. What kind of angel is a wrestling angel. The thing about angels is that - they fly - they have wings - they are neighbours in the hierarchy.
- Paul standing in the garden when I looked out, slight and wary, dark corduroy trousers and black wool shirt, face turned toward Luke on the top of the back steps, he's a tournesol too. At the edge of the dug area. Seeing the PNE through his eyes, the roller coaster, all the scaffolding, the sky ride beginning to move, first we saw its shadow; silence, stopping at the top of the ridge to look at the horses - Paul's presence allowed me to say what I hadn't formulated about the races - the way the racing horses, who have bizarre deformed monkeylike riders in brilliant satin, are escorted to the gate by sturdy nurse horses ridden by large people in drab: as if they are mad creatures, psychotic dangerous beasts, and then their relation to the deer at the centre, in the parkland, with ducks and a fountain. "I long ago stopped thinking of horses and deer as being similar animals," said Paul. "No one would think of riding a deer" said I: and that was the connection. When he holds me too long I'm uneasy, I feel pressed. Maybe it's to simplify it, I say he doesn't want to be denied sexually and will press to remove my refusal: that old tableau. I like my refusal. I like his unexpected observations: like my dream personnae he says what I hadn't imagined saying myself. Three cucumber plants on the window sill. The fireman who told me predictably, because he's the one who spied on me in bed with Paul Kinsella, that although I'm 30, I'm "an attractive woman" still, "built like an athlete." I say waspishly it's more important to be smart.
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