| dames rocket 1 part 6 - late summer 1975 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Saturday. In Vancouver again, a nightful of powerful dreams. There was a vast airplane of the future, a wide flat slab with lights on it [sketch], some kind of tail I don't remember. I was in a field watching it approach, saw it sinking in the sky and realized, just before it happened, that it was going to crash just beyond in the next field. It did, instant explosion of fire (no sound in this, or most, dreams), everyone dead. Later saw more of the same kind, touching down in a swoop and taking off again almost vertically, I assumed it was a pilot in training. Watched another of the airplanes touch down and do a sort of flip onto its back, which seemed cushioned as if by an immense rubber tire - or was it that the airplane now seemed very small, like a model. I saw people scurrying out of it, among them broadshouldered handsome men in uniform, all looking alike, I thought they must be the pilots, captains, and was curious to see how they were all so uniform in their captain-looks, they were like Ken dolls in fact. Another dream, which comes from my sadness, of Paul coming back and saying he'd slept with "five or six people." One of them appeared, a slight childish boy of a girl, in glasses and seeming very unlikely to me; but she put her thin arm on his shoulder familiarly (c/f Andy's baby girlfriend in London). I was apprehensive. Further, a vision of the pasture at the old place, I was walking through it and saw it covered with stumps, and divided into lots for sale, and was sad. - Dear Antonia Brico, your great unpretty face without pretty expressions, your vigor, your authority: oh my foremother who has survived! Sitting with the upright young pianist, straightening her collar before you go on, I was moved to little tears (and now I've spent too long talking vacuously with Madeleine and Dennis, and can't remember how you were - can't remember how I felt about you, my delight at your solid confidence, you weren't afraid to become strong in your exuberance, your immanence is safe enough, it's in your music and your struggle, you were glad to speak, you wanted to be great, yet your playful spirit playing ragtime, exiting in black and white, from the stage, off the screen, your house, outside and inside. You went to get Albert Schweitzer's picture, held his face up next to yours, moved and shy. Look at her, that old lady in her blotched face and wrinkled little eyes, her great slab of a face, the white streak of hair running through red, "the orchestra is my instrument," instruments played with skill, a sort of life, in music, among famous people; the other retired life in Denver, in a little house, among moments, monumental woman crying from the corner of the big frame, "Do you think I tell everyone? I want to work. I do five concerts a year, I have energy to do five concerts a month!" Jill Godmilow, Judy Collins 1974 dir Antonia: a portrait of the woman The hero tale for a girl - a girl whose birth is foretold, who is loved, taught, who burns with quality - who disentangles herself from loves, sweetness, but who is more than Joan of Arc in service of a king or a paternal god. What could she serve? Music. Medicine. I want a daughter. A beautiful man gifted either in music or ? to have a child asked or stolen of him. I am my daughter. Can't the descent rest for a while? - On Friday a young girl came into the bus, tall, narrow, low breasts, long neck, very fair, with a way of holding her head; there were scruffy children around her, she detached herself and looked out the window. She moved me so much I went to the back of the bus with my heart hammering and asked to take her picture. She said "Go ahead, as much as you like," and looked out the window again without smiling, composed as before. What royalty. I have her address. How can I help her? A film with her, but what is she? Look at me, how old I am beginning to look, worn. That's alright, but I've always worshipped looks like hers; it's a look Paul has in the photograph that I like of him. I can be honest when I look at her, I've no contempt to be ashamed of. She's for my daughter film. - Rather it should be a spur to the educator ever and again to trace the formative powers which have shaped this or that particular child. She should repeatedly walk round the child, as it were, contemplating her from all aspects, and never wary of deepening a knowledge of her particular laws of growth. One would like to advise all, to whom falls the nurture and education of children, to call to mind at evening before going to sleep the image of the being entrusted to their care. To contemplate her in all minutest details; how she walks, moves, and raises her hand, how she laughs or weeps, and so on. To sink oneself deep into this image; not disintegrating it and harassing oneself about it, but contemplatively, accepting it as it really is, not as one would like to have it. Then, in time, this child's image in the educator's soul will itself say what it wants to become. The genius of the child, her higher self, will speak; at first softly and then more clearly . Caroline von Heydebrand 1970 Childhood: a study of the growing soul Rudolf Steiner Press Von Heydebrand also talks about children's need for fairytales, heroic stories; seasonal festivals; idealism; ways of arousing consciousness (punishment might be one); sleeping and waking prayers; graces; the need of ceremony. The life of grown-up people should not be too much influenced by hard and fast habits and tradition. But in a child's life, which is still governed by other powers, traditions can be healthy and fruitful. Consciousness is a death of instinctive life. Michaelmas is Sept 29. - Luke is coming back on Tuesday, I'm looking forward and am wondering how I can start better - Luke is so deep and so sturdy I sometimes imagine him a weed doing better without cultivation, but constant joy could only be good for both of us. He seemed to be more sensitive when I was: we both need to look for safe holy places. He loves to work, I can help him with that. I can be more fierce with myself about going to bed times, and about mornings. We can cook together more. I can remember that there's enough of me for work and for real life with him too. I can try to learn/teach the other knowledges. We can make some games. Oh my Luke. I have to remember that sometime in the future Roy will tempt him, and he'll have to be strong in a right honesty then. He knows me; I have to be true for his sake too, but not his creature. I want:
- There was a homestead, a meadow stood in the midst of it, a two-track road, a fence at its end. There was a high country with sight of water, there were high ridges where sunset comes horizontally. Among the trees, tall black spruce and aspen new woods, there are houses, a long house, the farm house, where bachelors who need company live with each other, where there's cooking on festivals, dancing, music, meeting, learning, debate. Small houses hung like square pumpkins on vinelike paths from this central lodge, here's a narrow house with a verandah and a stone for a step. Inside a long clean room with a small chamber at the end, a loft with a child's bed in summer; familiar rugs, quiet, light stalking from board to board, ah but what do we do there? Do we dream clear childish dreams that simply nourish us? Who comes to speak to us, about what? - Woke well next morning looking at the shadow of a leaf laid across one pear on the branch, it's sunny, later I'll go to the sea. - Gurdjieff automatisms - In these working days at the dry, hot end of the summer, a number of 'events' - talking to Tom Knott about his photographs this morning on Granville, Sheila Reljic [of the NFB], the photography book at the art school, the dinner, talking to Paul on the bus and at the breakfast table this morning (he said "Older women will like you because they'll see the little girl in you, but you're going to have trouble with younger women because you're too strong for them." "Yes, I can feel how I sometimes try to damp myself with them.") - Paul only has two? weeks before he leaves maybe forever. "I might not miss you at all. If I go in a certain spirit, I'll just have a good time. If I am quiet, as I want to be, I'll miss you very much." On Sunday Paul read my journal on staying in Clearbrook and stopped twice or thrice a page to hug me. Coco found singing, stamping, in her particolored rags the morning before. The Women's Interart Cooperative meeting on Wednesday at the Centre on Main. Anna, Madeleine, Margaret. The Western Conference meeting tonight, Trudy with her womb gone looking younger, Eileen, Pat [Thom], Alice, Joyce, Eileen Caner, Jo [Leddingham], Marcie, Jean Errington, Hanna, Judith Bezereti, Diane Erickson. Jo showing me the picture of her younger daughter, "This is the pup, and if anyone ever changed her so that she didn't have that look any more, I'd kill them." After all this time - just now - since Port Townsend I've fallen a little in love with Paul Kinsella, I wonder what it means. Scares me and pleases me. - Well, and what I mean by that is: 1) pain, and 2) accepting the pain. Accepting a softness. When Paul came back from Salt Spring with a fanatical stare on his face I was icy in my stomach at first because I thought he'd brought another woman and then because I couldn't penetrate his confusion about whether he doesn't care about me or whether I don't care about him. He's rivalrous because of my work and busyness - my 'business personality', but it isn't that, my business personality is affectionate to him. It's his stupid masculine pride; what I can accept in him he cannot without deep protest and humiliation accept in me. (Waiting for me to come home from a meeting; having me going to an interview at NFB.) (Ambition, abstraction.) What was it he said, spiritual crisis, wants to be alone, doesn't know who I am, doesn't want to live on his personality but on some deeper connection, wants to centre. Didn't like our sexual connection on the evening when he was in my bed after his meeting, because it was 'objectifying' - how was it? There was a distance there but I was liking his surface, which felt talced. There are many ways to name his disaffection and its rationalizations, there are many postures I can take toward it, I am angry too at the way he conned me, no tried to con me, into guilt and bearing all of the ambivalence. It seems that now when he is taking back some of the power he kept trying to force on me he still wants to give me the same guilt. Well baby, box with shadows all you like, but none of it seems necessary to me. - The importance of identification in all our relation to art, primary relevance; the secondary (ie less immediate, not necessarily less important) is sensory education - just leading the senses along human neuro-trails they haven't been down before. Tonight the feeling in me is: oh my friends. There's been a tenderness, nostalgia. Where are you my mythical friends. - I went to Paul's house dressed austere-sex in my long black dress, silver boots, black jacket with geranium pinned on it, brown hat, plastic bag with six ginger cookies. Was a dark stranger arriving in a sleeping house, coming to the bivalve house at the top of the stairs, empty; waiting at the top of the stairs I encounter a small strange man wearing a scrubbed obstinate face, red, blunt ("You upgrade me spiritually, my Autumn Man will like you")("But my Summer Man is demonic, and fights you) who could not get near, though we tried. I told him how the front room had been lit so that it was a shimmering bubble moving through a lifetime, the sleeping children precious, the moment nostalgic for itself and for old times too, then on Hastings the street lights were soft and damp, the night lit by a white cloudy sky, everything wet and a sprinkler still showering the sidewalk up the street. I pelted out of the rocking chair to him; the shadow under his nose frightened me. I went into the bedroom and sat next to the pink light of the candle, and took off my red socks, and then my black dress and hung it on a knob behind the pink-lit green poinsettias and put my body into bed. Then Paul came and blew the candles out roughly and I fell asleep on the side of his pillow but we snacked perfunctorily first. When he woke this morning it was to find a wet spot under me, and a chill in the wet hair of my cunt. I had been leaking and smelled of semen when I got up naked and went to pee. There had been such powerful dreams, of houses, and such a depth into the night of them; 'Brownie' living in a brilliant apartment, took a series of pictures of me that made me feel she was in love with me. Paul woke from a similar dream density: it was as if we'd gone through a meteor belt. When we sat estranged at the breakfast table (Mocking bird on the radio) he made us a joint with his own clippings, plus a little Thai weed. When we'd smoked it I had begun to feel a strangeness in my head, as if half the head and face were heavy, dark, pulled backwards, dense, warm; and the other half light, thin, skim-milk, cool. I turned my head to test whether it was the weight of light I was feeling - it isn't - and when I would turn my head it was as if its molecules blurred, rocked. Meanwhile Paul told me about flirting with the gay community in San Francisco, the man who made him feel very pretty, sharp, witty. He and the man who courted him playing each other's roles. ("Have you had any thirteen year old runaways in here lately?" said Paul.) ("Haven't you always felt there was something dead-end about women, sort of, artistically?" said the other.) I felt his remoteness, there were lines up and down like guitar strings, that make him up, only one seemed the one I know. I made a complaint about his resentment of my work, he betrayed his fear of my success. ("You'll inevitably look at me in another way." "I'm not knocking it, you've been poor long enough.") Perverse separation. Perverse completion: how did you come to be kneeling against my pelvis, with your arms around me, rocking. We became a period piece, two people in a sitting room, my father asleep upstairs. We have our arms around each other and we know that this late quiet night, not by design but by some circumstance, as it happens, he is going to come into me for the first time. He touches my nipples boldly, he puts his hand under my dress, he is bold and I am safe, because we know each other so well. I lie under his hand like a landscape, a wide expanse rolling toward his hands and his cock, the three points of his triangle. My breasts rise into pyramids that yearn toward him like oceans to a moon, he says they make cones that penetrate him. We lie back in wondering ease because we were children together, we have always known each other's bodies, one day I took him into a sack, when I was eleven, and showed him my breasts starting to grow. We are brother and sister, and we're fearless, we're serene, because we understand each other and so believe ourselves. Our bodies saying, mate. There is a hole in me that I feel powerfully. It calls you. You are an axis, we are two merry-go-round horses interpenetrated by our poles, we're rocking on the poles, rising, falling, like pieces facing opposite directions. We're translucent, we're locked directionless in a vast space. His cock writes vivid characters in my cunt, his cock is a torch probing the walls of my central room. He is a farmer plowing, digging, scraping, my well, my acres. What brilliant strokes you are making in my cunt. You're such a heat and light. I am so welcoming to the stranger who has come into my place, I take his traveling clothes away and warm him with kisses, I make him a fine bed to lie in. Paul speaks his role in a wooden way, "My lovely sister, it is so good to have my hands on you here," he has leaned his thighs against the chair so his cock rests steady inside me like a shelf, I rock toward and away from it, I slide around my piston, when it touches my cervix heat grows in me by slow friction. "I'm drinking you very deeply, I'm filling you full." Your root, my hand on his scrotum, is the bulldozer that stuffs you into me, how you are riding me, "How I am riding you, how far out into space we are." (When we arrive I say, to show I have noticed: I am surprised how conscious and passive I am in my real sex, how I am waiting and watching.) The whiteness of fucking: the light on Paul's shelf, a weathered green board, where a ship made of shells, a snail shell the keel, lies on its side between two flower pots, in a light so fine and so white I mourn that it will never come again. Incest is an idea that attracts us so much, as an idea: it is an instinctive myth. The sense I had of a brother - not a real brother - a mythical brother, leaning his torso at pleasant ease on my dreamy body, where sex rises like air deflected into visibility by reflected heat, ah, brother, fasten your fingers on my nipples like the claws of a battery, they on the outside of me and your cock inside, you make me an utterly live circuit. I feeling your separation with my hands and your join with my cunt. You are a fruit whose stem is in me (you are my child), you sway on our stem like the sea. "Sister you are so rich in your sex, I was hungry for you but I didn't know what a richness you would be." Something phony in the acting, I wished him less didactic, but when I recall it, something so real and elemental in the fucking itself, that my cunt burns for him, as if an artery is opened and my cunt will tyrannize me so I'll become a whore because my imagination is flooded with cock, the idea of it, my still openness to it, cock come into it. You are perfectly bold because you know me as well as yourself, you are perfectly bold, you put your hand on my hip just after I dream that you do, you take my body to be with yours as if you own it, you gather me and then in the wideness of my slope you find the cave, the round-walled entrance under the hill is your secret passage. Now we'll carry our secret intimacy like a sense of walking around without underclothes. - Sunday evening, people going to the concert have their west outlined, then coated, with the horizontal light. The green tree at the house's flank has red berries. Vague clouds and amorphous light are piled on the mountains. Paul doesn't understand that I try to guard a plausibility in our blisses by sifting them and weighing them; he wanted me just to leave his 'physical happiness' intact. He doesn't understand either that I brought myself a while before he telephoned, the tension in my cunt being too much to keep on alone. Also he doesn't know how strange everything seems. - Photography - reading the artscanada issue on the debate, pure photography / impression / art / feelings. Anne Trueblood Brodzky, Rose Danesewich, Nick Johnson eds An inquiry into the aesthetics of photography Artscanada December 1974: Volume 31, Nos 3 & 4: Issue Nos 192/193/194/195 Society for Art Publications Steiglitz about his cloud pictures "All art is but a picture of certain basic relationships; an equivalent of the artist's most profound experience of life." The difference between Evans and Frank, documentary of the 30s and 60s, an irrevocable change in our view of 'the people'? Defending the place. I know my picture-taking posture is on my knees; thinking about writing - it is easier, therefore I don't write only on my knees - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - her way was to research exaggerations - nature that is marvelous or horrible and so comes to the same thing - identification with extreme states in which we feel enlarged. I felt momentarily that the right ethic / esthetic would be clear to me if I stopped to think of it. In my body and childhood I have faith in a certain balance of forms, in straightforward wonders and beauties. Art, culture, is dishonest and doesn't reverence the gateways, but exploits them. Therefore we doubt, and despise, what resembles 'beauty' and revelation. Therefore looking for what 'the people' don't value sentimentally we make careers out of rubbish. Sometimes we succeed in making it moving - the body finds its values and signs, tensions, 'equivalents' in the risked selections at random. What can we identify with so that we respect ourselves? Tom Knott's photographs: I was feeling for the first time the importance of precise tones, and of a precarious balance - "Photography is a tool well fitted for the exploration of those areas of our experience in which we recognize but do not understand meaning . Not often, but occasionally the meaning will be so nearly invisible that it will be present in one print and absent in another, only marginally different, made from the same negative." Szarkowski If we put aside the question of history, and what we're doing for 'the culture' we could decide on the basis of what would give us the holiest or happiest life - but is the way to the holiest life, the way through what appear to us to be the most seductive/powerful doors? Or is it better to cast at random and in hunger toward whatever is there, to let the body/soul find out what it can use? Hunger / have to be starving, but not weakened - how do we do that? Is it only the original undefeated fierce child in us. The idea of incest. The idea of the woman and man in a ballroom, she in a lowcut gown, each desiring the other from the position of their own perfect manhood or womanhood. The idea of a window. Having the thing is not good for us because it is the idea of the thing that we want - conventions, mythologies. Is this Platonic? - Note about Tuesday Excessive sex hunger: rocking in the two chairs facing and cuddling, talking, Paul confessing and clearing himself, about his romantic onslaught at first being a way of controlling me so that he could leave easily when he liked. I saying that if I found a man who had perfect balance and lucidity I would really love him, on a platform of respect. His eyes went very blue and dark, his face got a tragic look around his mouth, he said he couldn't kiss me because he felt so unfit, a half-loved liar. I said that's the way it always was, nothing new in that, and eventually we went to bed and it was lovely, very orange - I nearly came on its own, he said he heard his aura afterwards. When we got up (Luke was gathering apples) we were both white and clear as milk, we looked very young and innocent, our faces had let go of their habits, we felt good together, laughed and cooked and I was absent minded to a comical extent. After supper Paul made a fire for Judy who was cold, we three sat in the living room and I talked to Judy about old days, read her the story about the cellar and the old house. She was sewing and looked pale and lovely, talking about the miseries of her childhood, and the good time in Sexsmith, how there was a middle class there we could fit into, lawyers, doctors and shopkeepers. Evoking young Judy with her lace stockings and bleached hair getting up at 5:30 every winter morning to be alone, listen to records, and study. When we went to bed we tried to fuck again - it seemed a familiar thing, by that time, him climbing over my knees - but my body just went to sleep and he came as if it was pulled out by the tail. So we woke this morning from dense murky sleep, I from unpleasant dreams. It is good to be working today. - Margaret [Shore] and her idea for a film of a pan along the join where weeds meet the wall - we got excited about ways we could print and play with it. - With Cathy this morning, drinking coffee and working feverishly, knocking the AV into shape, liking each other's ideas ('getting off on' them), gossiping with Sam, then rushing to Cibachrome and to Margaret's house at Riley Park, and then REALLY WORKING in high excitement, on Margaret's slides - - There were many dreams, after coming bitterly home from bad Paul at Frank's house - feeling a void in me and in him where our thing had been it seemed falsely constructed in very bad faith - he'd had the mannerisms of a man with a bad conscience - so I can choose to leave it alone - but it hurts - - The alchemical definition of meditatio: "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Jung in intro to Four archetypes. Archetype - idea - prototype - categories - instinct - forms of ideas - Jung 1971 intro to Four archetypes: mother / rebirth / spirit / trickster vol 9 Collected works Es erschlos ihm fast unbegrenzte Moglichkeiten, under gleichgearteten Menschen, unter vogelfreinen Engeln und Teufeln, herrliche Freunde zu finden ... Ernst Dreams - a circus - Paul on a Ferris wheel in rhinestone underpants doing acrobatic flips, dangerous impressive Paul. A man and a curly-haired girl called him away, referred to themselves ironically as the Mafia. I felt he was being courted for the daughter. Wain came into the high bleachers with paper bags, one was a gift from Paul, rhinestones and sequins. The other he dumped on the floor, it was old bits of nylon nightgowns and such, he seemed to stir them and they reassembled in a bundle, wrapped with a pink ribbon the other end of which he held like a leash. The bundle seemed animate, moved in rushes like a little dog. At another moment not long after, I was crouched on the floor looking at Wain, also crouching, with a long intense look almost of love. A cabin where I lived with Luke. Roy was staying there, gave me uneasiness. Woke dreaming about the project. - Often wake dreaming about the project. - Luke on the bus, going to the Cinemateque, sat on my lap cozying his head against my chin, murmured "Do you know how I am feeling now? ----- (unintelligible)." "How?" "I am feeling PROUD OF YOU!" On the bus on the way home, overtired, hysterical, howling. Walking from the Nanaimo bus stop, face scarred with tears, wailing, across the road from Paul and me. This morning Roy's voice on the telephone, his accent more overbearing and English than it was, but his voice hesitant, nervous laughs, throat-clearings, polite nothings. How unjoyful it was in spite of his saying "It is a happy time for me." The weird fantasy of this new woman, a wedding October 11th in the Priory, with "Bach on the organ," thousands of guests, and Roy in the Chisholm dress tartan with his 31 year old bride newly confirmed into the Catholic church! I guess his love-illusions whenever they go deepest take a religious revival with them. She "cooks wonderfully" and is making a waistcoat for Luke that is bee-you-tiful. "She is my perfect woman." They are going to have lots of babies and adopt one for every one they have. I'd like her very much he says and they'd be very glad if I could come to the wedding. "Your brides are always pregnant" I say and he laughs uneasily, I sense her uneasy next to him, and says "I haven't married anyone before." Sad Roy, he seemed sad to me. "It's lovely to hear your voice" he said unenthusiastically; "My voice is shaking," that was truer. Oh what emptiness, familiar chill coming into me. Paul hysterical and impossible too. What bridge is there with these beings who were adolescent boys, all the predatory crudeness in them, their baby-fixations on the cunt. Are men really less complete than women? So hungry, irrational, jealous, weird, unfocused and out of relation to objects and places. - inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content My cunt is a very honest organ. - The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experience designated by that term must actually exist ... So, if we want to find out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in order to ascertain what 'rebirth' has been understood to mean. Hath time flown away? Do I not fall? Have I not fallen - hark! - into the well of eternity? Thus spoke Z The 'primitive' - "complicated exercises are needed if he is to pull himself together for any activity that is conscious and intentional and not just emotional and instinctual." The Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal Any case where the recognition of a greater personality seems to burst an iron ring round the heart Mankind has always formed groups which made collective experience of transformation possible. The regressive identification with more primitive states of c is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life; hence the quickening effect of regressive identifications with half-animal ancestors Given another name and thereby another soul, and then the demons no longer recognized him Like the old man in our fairy tale, he too, will draw mandalas and seek shelter in their protective circle; in the perplexity and anguish of his self-chosen prison, which he had deemed a refuge, he is transformed into a being akin to the gods. Mandalas are birth places, vessels of birth in the most literal sense ... an inner friend of the soul. That is why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual ... It reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself would like to change us. The fate of the numinous figures recorded in it grips the hearer, because the story gives expression to parallel processes in his own unconscious which in that way are integrated with consciousness again. The great psychic danger which is always connected with individuation, or the development of the self, lies in the identification of ego and consciousness with the self. This produces inflation. Mythologies of childhood - my child, who told stories of a hill under which were caverns with jewels, and food. - Paul and I dreaming of rosy middle age. He is writing (his face is only fine and has lost its greed) in his study. The French window is open onto a garden: a post-menopausal idyll. I come to the doorway. We are a literary couple, as in 1860 or when was it that George Eliot lived with Lewes unmarried, and our friends are brilliant. When [he was] sitting at the table this bright morning reading my journal for goodbye, I asked Paul to tell me what he thought I could write, and he replied, "I can only tell you this, that you're as brilliant as anyone I've met." - Margaret, at forty halfway between my mother and myself, yet my sister. I do not shrink from her body. In her honesty she is like Mary. What a mythical adventure to befriend her! "The bird-men are a species of angel" angelos - messenger - Khidr, first Angel of God, Angel of the Face - make Luke an angel - Jung "the passionate religious eros of the Arab" The uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of good and evil, the remorseless concatenation of guilt, suffering and redemption. This path to the primordial religious experience is the right one, but how many can recognize it? It is like a still small voice, and it sounds from afar. It is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure, a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God's sake only, without assurance and without sanction. The mountain stands for the goal of the pilgrimage and ascent, hence it often has the psychological meaning of the self. The unexpected and improbable power to succeed, which is one of the peculiarities of the unified personality in good or bad alike The conscious will by itself is hardly ever capable of uniting the personality to the point where it acquires this extraordinary power to succeed The objective intervention of the archetype is needed The unconscious, whose contents are without exception paradoxical or antinomial by nature In Christian mysticism and Indian philosophy "the clearest elaboration of the antinomies of the unconscious" To the degree that a man is overpowered by the unconscious there is not only a more unbridled intrusion of the instinctual sphere, but a certain feminine character makes its appearance, which I have suggested should be called 'anima'. If, on the other hand, a woman comes under the domination of the unconscious, the darker side of her feminine nature emerges all the more strongly, coupled with markedly masculine traits. - I'd like to learn to help Luke elaborate and sustain his archetypes - I tell Luke an angel, Angelos, white, not made of flesh, but light, with white wings and blue eyes, who will be his special friend. "What do you want to ask your angel?" "Can he make my birthday come sooner?" "No there have to be all the days in the year, we can't skip any. Why do you want your birthday to come sooner?" "I want my daddy to come to see me." That old pain back: I want to live with my daddy, I don't want to live with you. I discussed it. I said it hurts me to be near his daddy. He said, "You should trust him to not be mean any more." I said I had sometimes trusted him but he had been mean all the same. "And so now you don't trust him any more." I said I know he loves Roy and trusts him, and Roy loves him, but Roy isn't a good home-maker. Also there is one thing he does that he shouldn't do - he buys you too many toys. "And candy." "The reason he shouldn't do that is that he shouldn't make you love him by buying you toys, but by being a good man."
I remember your women: Mafalda, Jud, Prue, Christie, myself. You've found your perfect woman more than often. I remember for you. It adds to zero, a bitter woman and you newly in love renewing your body with a new woman opened with the skeleton. - Another dream of killing the father. A fat man walking past my cover in long grass. I feel I've escaped but his footstep returns, his heel brushes my side under the grass, he turns, his heel grazes me more deliberately. I am upright and beat his balls (he doesn't protect himself) until I know he is dead (he doesn't change in any way). A sad dream nostalgic for my own beauty, locating it at a certain time in the past, remembering it as a certain angle of the cheek that dazzled me. Something like the bus depot picture but thinner and browner. - Carmichael appeared to me in the bus, Olivia having left or died, something unambiguous; we began to work out how we would court slowly but in perfect confidence, how I would not sleep with him until I was crazy for him (and not at all, if I wasn't), (in my dream last night I put my mouth against the smooth shoulder skin of a man, smelled him, thought how lovely it was to have a tall man again); how I would let him have a few adventures with young girls and then 'marry' him in an impulsive ceremony of our own (like becoming blood brother with Paul Kinsella) and thereafter be sure of his preference. Held his image with me for a while, remembered the morning when I was sleeping in his study: he stirred when the kids got noisy, I was sleeping naked and grabbed the sheets to pull over my legs when I heard his door. He stalked out long-legged - his legs are stronger than when he was a weedy youth - in underpants, and I feigned sleep to look at him. When he came up the stairs I'd arranged the sheet at an angle just above the bum cleft, to display my brown back and narrow waist and solid hip - I listened hard to hear him hesitating at this door. I'd like to entrench myself in this daydream, see how it speaks my heart's desire, Paul is too little for me, he's right to feel that he doesn't engage my desire for the glamour of a man (what gave me to Roy); Paul is too old-womanish panicky and unmanly for me. Would I be afraid of Carmichael? I dream that I'd be as sure of myself as with Paul, because I've practiced. This time I would be equal; the curse would be lifted. (Is it lifting just little by little?) We would feel our conjuncture as mythical, we'd be the Egyptian king and queen (but how your voice is creeping into my writing Paul Kinsella!), we'd be long-necked contemplatives carrying our glee into the public domain, we'd be wise rulers exchanging lectures. You'd have to learn slowly my different ways - I must have light in my house and not sleep in muggy dark. I do not take sleeping pills. I am muscular not fat. I am old in a way. My taste is tyrannical. I won't visit your family. (I'll be your family; in a way), tender hawk-face will you touch me that way again, as if saying you see all my mortality with your blind hand. (Sudden appearance of the moon signifies the sky broken open after cover all day.) (Paul in his journal says I give the softest most conscious kisses of all.) Each with a child, sometimes we would live together, sometimes apart, I'd go to conferences. I'd learn to drive. We'd be poor. I'd buy a farm. I'd be glad to see you. My body would turn to you before it woke. My other lovers would be women. We'd live in London. I would be proud of you, I'd take you quietly to everyone I loved, everyone would be glad to see you so alert and ideal. I would be your tree, as you would be mine, planted and circumferal. Within reach.
|