| dames rocket 2 part 1 - fall 1975 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Vancouver, September 1975] What shall I say about how -
When I got home I cleaned my room and the kitchen, went out into the garden in clogs to pick nasturtiums by moonlight, finding them under their big leaves. At noon I nearly turned cartwheels. There was a letter from Joann, with a teacup stain over the address, describing a garden. Sarah, Penelope, Joann, this is to let you know that -
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A long reasonable dream in which Peter Harcourt and I went to see Annie Dillard, who had become a thin-faced woman with her hair cut short (and dark) who talked brilliantly but impersonally and distractedly. -
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When he wet his bed Luke cried so much last night that I shouted at him, he banged, I shouted again, he only cried more. At last I went upstairs, asked him to turn off the light so I could come in. He was in a misery huddle on the side of the bed, choking his voice. I said why was he crying so much. He said he was lonely and wanted a real person to sleep with him, somebody what is real. I asked what sort of person he wanted. He said he wanted me. I said it was hard because I wanted him to be able to learn to be by himself without me; and that when he was grown he would have friends in his bed as I do, to hug. He said his body can do everything my body can do. I said I didn't understand exactly what he means. He said he couldn't tell me all the things, it would take more than a day. We said o universe and he went to sleep. - Margaret you are a samuri. - "You lesbian," she says (laughing), "do you want to fuck me?" Yes, I do. -
- Jung: "Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric .... It is a style I find embarrassing." Jung 1963 Memories, dreams, reflections Philomen said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. I went walking up and down the garden with him. There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clouds were breaking apart and the blue waters of the sea were becoming visible between them. But the water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colors. Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it in order to impress it upon my memory. During the days when I was occupied with the painting, I found in my garden, by the lake shore, a dead kingfisher! Philomen had a lame foot, but was a winged spirit, whereas Ka represented a kind of earth demon or metal demon the mythopoetic imagination - Maggie when she is in bed and has her glasses off is beautiful in a way that affects me to my simple core, she makes me think of a suffering Greek heroine, Penelope maybe, her profile is so fragile, her eyes and mouth worn into such sensual intelligence. She is a little tragic, she is ages old, her voice has a timbre that's thirteen years old. I sometimes glimpse a girl in pigtails.
"I love your fear," you said, "I hope I can learn it." When I stopped in despair of my clumsiness, I looked at her and said, You have to teach me some things, I feel like a eunuch. Oh Maggie your hands and your face holding me between them. Fixing the porch: I went into Saturday and left you alone. Washed clothes, picked apples. Your soul in daylight goes up into your face, it is always in your hands, you walk like a man, you hide behind your hair and your spectacles, your body has no poise. But you know how to give it. You turn to it. "Just be in your body, don't think of anything, go with how it is to touch and be touched." -
- A woman Maggie knows: before the man would give her an abortion, he made her fuck him. Margaret and Maureen in each other's arms crying because of Maureen's abortion. Maggie's baby: the first time, after nine years, "I was crying for me, I was crying for the baby." - In the middle of Burrardview Park, in the rimmed open dark, sloped to the river lights, lying next to each other, before the parents' meeting. Then she took off running, at an angle to my path. Hair flying. On the wall there was an island shaped like a flying thing - around it lettering bends as if a reef following the shore contours - STRAIT OF GEORGIA. Maggie don't look in here I want to make notes about you. I want not to be shy here. How it is when you bend your profile to the guitar book. When I'm so in love how can I string myself at a pitch to carry off this AV? I simply love you, with gratitude, trust, compassion, pity, admiration, with dazzled eyes. Singing after breakfast, Shady Grove, Careless Love, Henry Martin, Moscow Nights - Ooo I love you in my belly just above my belt. I love you in my hands and in my slithery cunt, along the in-sides of it. I love your bandy Amazon, I love the rainbow of genders in you, I love your giggle (one note - hgnng). I love your flat soft hair. I love your flat pale brown eyes. I love your narrow nose with its notch. I love your small mouth set at no comment ("Why should I respond for you"). I love the way you leap into bed, breasts swinging, like an old Chinese mountain man letching a maiden. I love your back and its strong hunch. I love your fine-fleshedness, none of your back is loose. I love your narrow cunt like an abrupt little mountain with a tunnel into it. I love your jade ring. I love your nicks, cuts, your dirty fingernails. I love your cackle when you talk to Marnie. - No need to say what happens. It's unfamiliarity, maybe for that - - Leslie working in the basement and leaving. Anna working upstairs and leaving. It cut me right into my belly. Don't know what ghosts of personal rejection rushed in then. Is it poverty, crippledness, unease? Don't I make them welcome? Is it Luke? "I know you're idealistic about having people work here." She's uneasy too because she too feels that it's personal rejection. - Lonely chill in the belly today, maybe it's slump - the film festival is frightening me. Maya Deren is the only woman to be shown (co-directed two films), oh no Shirley Clark too (one film). That scares me stiff. Where are we? Does it imply that what I'm making will fall into hostile hands? Are there any friends for me? -
Maybe need a devil's advocate with the lover who loves Maggie Shore, say, lady, like your oracle's voice and the personality voice, given a choice, baby - dunno. Two pieces here, want to destroy the one because it's a lie - a too-truthful lie saying I want a big deal between us, I'm trying to find a way for that to convince me;
The oracular voice, good rhetoric, sentences in loops that read too smooth to understand. - Coming to the pile of Natural Light materials feeling helpless, scared, wasted, thinned and unprivate, as if I'd had no thoughts with vitality for a long time. Innerness. What happens with Maggie is so speechless, I hold her and goodness comes into me, but I continue to want to leave out the roommate exchanges, although I have a lot of goodwill, as she does. How to build up to courage for all the technical blocks? - Atmosphere of ideas. But Luke holds me too. - The fresh clouds just off the cold high mountainside, blowing up, snow white, from new snow-fields.
Pinworms: I sometimes capture one alive - they have a little pointed head and tail. Singing songs with Luke in the kitchen, making supper, it was already dark outside, after walking on the low wharf-shelf below the residential cliff, Riv-Tow tugs, Maggie playing guitar. Despairing. Thinking of Ian, Andy, their confidence with music, outrages me: M, in all her gifts, is shy as I am. Boldness: we can bring it to pass between us. This morning, stopping in the kitchen, corridor, bedroom, to get lost in an embrace, briefly; it's our real form of love-making. The other is almost what we do for the sake of convention. Genitality seems man's invention, which we've learned to like. M says my sexuality seems to be growing, that my touch has a depth it didn't at first. I know what she means. It happens that I feel my body in a slow whipping oscillation - like the pinworm's dance - when I touch or kiss her. Like a pulse. Like the heartbeat sway when sitting crosslegged. It has to do with being all there. I embrace her and am warmed instantly. I am loving. I can't be faulted. - Detailed dream of going to England - seeing Andy - Catherine - Sara, Roy, and Sarah. - Erich Neumann 1954 The Origins and History of Consciousness Princeton The archetypal structural elements of the psyche are psychic organs whose injury has disasterous consequences. Do they degenerate after 30? In making the unconscious conscious, "consciousness thus acquires images (Bilder), and education (Bildung)" Archetypes, or primordial images, are "the pictorial form of the instincts, for the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious mind in images which, as in dreams and fantasies, initiates the process of conscious reaction and assimilation." Morpology of psyches - inherited images [in the Jung quotes below I sometimes substitute female pronouns for male] Ego consciousness evolves by passing through a series of eternal images and the ego, transformed in the passage, is constantly experiencing a new relation to the archetypes. Relation of personal and transpersonal. The symbolism of 'masculine' and 'feminine' is archetypal and therefore transpersonal; in the varous cultures concerned, it is erroneously projected upon persons, as though they carried its qualities. In reality every individual is a psychological hybrid. Even sexual symbolism cannot be derived from the person, because it is prior to the persons. Conversely, it is one of the complications of individual psychology that in all cultures the integrity of the personality is violated when it is identified with either the masculine or the feminine side of the symbolic principle of opposites. The reduction of the transpersonal to the personal springs from a tendency, which once had a very deep meaning, but which the crisis of modern consciousness has rendered wholly meaningless and nonsensical. It is necessary for the structure of personality that contents originally taking the form of transpersonal deities should finally come to be experienced as contents of the human psyche. But this process ceases to be a danger to psychic health only when the psyche is itself regarded suprapersonally, as a numinous world of transpersonal happenings. If, on the other hand, transpersonal contents are reduced to the data of a purely personalistic psychology, the result is not only an appalling impoverishment of individual life but aso a congestion of the collective unconscious that has disasterous consequences . [top of page: Hegel's sweet, giant mythology] task of evolving a collective and cultural therapy the relation of the ego to the unconscious and of the personal to the transpersonal ... the theatre of the encounter is the human mind Cassirer has shown how, in all peoples and in all religions, creation appears as the creation of light. The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object. The question of the beginning the psyche always poses this question afresh as one that is essential to it. The psyche blends, as does the dream; it spins and weaves together, combining each with each. The symbol is therefore an analogy, more an equivalence than an equation, and therein lies its wealth of meanings, but also its elusiveness. Only the symbol group, compact of partly contradictory analogies, can make something unknown, and beyond the grasp of consciousness, more intelligible and more capable of becoming conscious. Where, as among the primitives, sexual intercourse often begins in childhood but does not lead to the begetting of children - The desire to remain unconscious is the universally natural. The instinct toward consciousness is the specifically human. One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation. Man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea. Wherever the incest motif appears, it is always a prefiguration of the hieros gamos, of the sacred marriage consummation which attains its true form only with the hero. The urobic mode of propagation, where begetter and conceiver are one, results in the image of immediate genesis from the semen, without partner and without duality. In India, tapas, 'inward heat' and 'brooding' is the creative force with whose help everything is made. He found foothold on the earth. When he had found a firm foothold there, he thought: I will propagate myself. He emitted heat and became pregnant. We emit heat, easily, when embracing.
The Jewish midrash says that over the unborn baby in the womb there burns a light in which it sees all the ends of the world. For this reason many people treat children with particular marks of respect. In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to her; indeed, many of her sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge that still derives from her prenatal existance. It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from 'over there.' Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forbear. The dissolution of emotional components is not yet complete. Only if a thought is a passion that grips the heart can it reach ego consciousness and be perceived; consciousness is only affected by the proximity of the idea to the archetype.
Centroversion - "center of gravity lies in the building up and filling out of a personality which as the nucleus of all life's activities, uses the objects of the inner and outer worlds as building material for its own wholeness" The flower-like boys seduced, castrated and killed by the Great Mother - Paul thinks he is one of these! - The fear of the Great Mother with her bloody layer seems like my fear of unreasonable unformed men - Says that in India, Egypt, the mother goddesses are also the goddesses of war. The emotional, passionate nature of the female in wild abandon is a terrible thing for man and his consciousness. The dangerous side of woman's lasciviousness, although suppressed, misunderstood, and minimized in patriarchal times, was still a living experience in earlier ages. Deep down in the evolutionary stratum of adolescence, the fear of it still dwells in every man and works like a poison wherever a false conscious attitude represses this layer of reality into the unconscious. In the matriarchy, the brother has higher claims than husband or son, who are 'strange men' In the patriarchy, the woman cleaves to the strange man and gives him the power and loyalty of her former connections. - the image of Isis sitting with wide-open legs upon a pig - the "strengthening of the masculine principle through male friendships and also 'the spiritual sister'" - the conscious or unconscious picture of the Terrible Mother makes men afraid of coitus - did Paul go hysterical with fear when we didn't fuck, because the time gave him anticipation of it? - "the hero and the beast that kills him are often identical" - "space organized with reference to the ego" - "undeniable sense of deficiency that attaches to the emancipated ego" - adolescence - "Mutilation is the condition of all creation." - puberty of ego consciousness, devalues its origin in the unconscious, compensated by a depressive self-destruction c/f Noel Burch, Keith [top of the page: "the Bear, whose maternal characteristics are well known"] - The androcentrism of this account, which seems to assume that the goddess bears only sons - feminine evening star - Ishtar of Mesopotamia - the goddess who holds the lily in one hand and the snake in the other Among domestic animals all males except the one finest are castrated, leaving the one bull, boar, in a powerful but lonely position, where he has little to say about the lives of the reproducers, apart from 'serving' or 'servicing' them. The essence of the mythological canon of the hero-redeemer is that she is fatherless or motherless, that one of the parents is often divine, and that the hero's mother is frequently the Mother Goddess herself or else betrothed to a god. These mothers are virgin mothers. As elsewhere in the ancient world, virginity simply means not belonging to any man personally; viginity is in essence sacred, not because it is a state of physical inviolateness, but because it is a state of psychic openness to god. At the same time the utter absorbtion of the mother in the experience of birth, and especially at the birth of a hero, forms the essence of the myth. He is a human being like the others, mortal and collective like them, yet at the same time he feels himself a stranger to the community. Both the parental figures are there twice over for the hero, personally and transpersonally. Their confusion with one another, and particularly the projection of the transpersonal image upon the personal parents, is an abiding source of problems in childhood. - Saturday being taken up by making the collage, which has powers in it although it is not quite right. Images, a form of fantasy that seemed to clear my eyes so that when I took Ammon home I saw: To the west, a bar of pink under the darkness of the rest of the sky, and in the foreground, surrounded by dark in an alley, faintly lit from an invisible source, the side of a pink garage in the same tone. Six slim women emerging from a house onto the street, in single file, with glittering shoes and glittering saris whose colors become visible as they come under the influence of the street lamp. A pillar of white smoke rising from the sidewalk where it obscured an entire corner. Then, another snorting cloud rising from the opposite corner, behind a mailbox that it isolated in red and white. These things seemed wonderful to me. Also, for a while this noon standing at the kitchen door at a crossing of doors - basement, bedroom, kitchen - when I had my hand on Maggie's breast some perfect form of love's body became me: my torso was like an axe bade with which I seemed to have cut into Maggie in most gentle but honed and dazzling penetration. The things that don't seem wonderful: Luke in his manic excitement with his friends. My intolerance of him today. The way Maggie does not understand me when I speak in the elliptic, natural way that Paul delighted in. I am ashamed of my impatience with her then, and I hide it, and I feel she is almost wilfully obtuse, because there's somebody in her that speaks in the same way and understands perfectly. It is the same in conversation, I sometimes have a sense that she's being obtuse to flatter people, that it is a habit like Mother's flattering habits; it's a deliberate self-diminution. Especially when the razor-lady reappears and is heard laughing that resonant hnng in the next room. I swerved today from joy in the eccentric beauty of all the world, to feeling tonight how thin my works are and how little I dare in the arena of the world, to create the friends I need. - The fight with the mother: involves fight with domestic psychic arrangements: arranged dependency, the nursey voice, sweetness blackmail. In any relationship I fight the mother either in myself or in projection. The mother stands for repression into banality, family lies, prison, guilt, sleep, dopiness, laboriously secure conversation, caution, being emotionally crowded, a model for insecurity taken as lifestyle, flattery. The mother also is: intelligence, understanding of the creature nature, frustrated gifts, bound feet, therefore guilt but an impetus forward, support for the person not the product, a place in the world, a validity of the inner, a definition of the outer (?). Creation of the illusion of personality among personalities. The father also is frustration, rage, repression, redefinition in terms of lacks, a visible body as opposed to the mother's invisible one. Both are representations of social orderliness. What distinguishes the hero is active incest, the deliberate conscious exposure of himself to the dangerous influence of the female, and the overcoming of man's immemorial fear of woman. - What distinguishes the psychology of women, then, would be a dual form of woman-idea, ie
For the ego and the male, the female is synonymous with the unconscious and the non-ego, hence with darkness, nothingness, the void, the bottomless pit. In Jung's words: "It should be remarked that emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin." - I'm amazed to see this is exactly what I feel about men. Does that mean that, given two sexes, whatever sex is culturaly dominant will see the other as a hole and a void? - Lethargy. Impotence. - Needing to conquer my terror of the male, enter the void, the peril of the unconscious, to be wed triumphantly to the Male who castrates young women, and the Father who destroys them. (Transliteration.) Leave me a fully grown woman independent enough to overcome the power of the man and to reproduce a new being in him. Goddess Athene, who herself was not born of woman, but sprang from the head of Zeus, and whose nature, therefore is profoundly inimical to the chthonic feminine element in evey mother and every woman born of a mother. This Athene aspect of woman is bound up with psychological significance of the anima and sister. It is this same virginal quality which comes to the aid of the hero in his fight with the mother-dragon .... The intention to kill the father as discipline and executive power within the family. I too need to kill the father. "Duty, coercion, and prohibition." Mother's repression more personal. "Without the murder of the father, no development of consciousness or personality is possible." So begins man's political life, which is almost always identical to the rise of the patriarchate. - My thrilling lady's unfamiliar voice on the telephone. I haven't noted some things - in your absence mysterious lady I can remember you. Odd things - last night we went to bed, M read me some Elizabeth Sargent poems. - Interrupt to say - it seemed last night to be tragic that my body's early fever toward Maggie has gone away, so I can hardly remember its state, something happens when we stand in corridors; but her's has continued in its first state and is lonely; and I feel distressed at having abandoned her, when I was so willing to continue to be lost in eros with her. It isn't possible when I live with people. I remember saying "My body is more in love with you than it has ever been with anyone," and crashing over the hillside with the pain and weakness of that. Paul has been unreal, nothing but his name came through, then tonight just now looking at his face and shoulders on the wall, I thought of his fussiness and heard him say in his ironical affectionate way "hello;" I think he must be feeling better. - - Said he had a dream that someone wrote him talking of his grapefruit plant growing with a new lover, that it had been a nightmare when it happened, but that it had not hurt much now. - Said he'd had a vision of me as a black-hulled freighter - this was last night's dream, a freighter he was clinging to. - A dream of Luke coming into his Bray sweetshop with someone he wanted to marry, being told he was too young and going outside, crying; the intended bride had gone on without him. Paul comforted him saying it was not that she didn't want to marry him but that he would have to wait until he was older. Meanwhile the bride was half a mile ahead, on the horizon, a Quixote figure doing a "tightrope dance" with long spindly legs like spilled ink. - He says he fights with me every day and wants to write a novel. He has been isolated and full of deja-vu. I said it was true I had been oblivious. - Owen Barfield Almost any kind of strangeness may produce an aesthetic effect qualitatively the same as that of serious poetry. The strangeness must be felt as arising from a different plane or mode of consciousness. foreign, or old, words technical vocabulary of specialized trades concentrating attention on a familiar thing by making it stand out suddenly from an unfamiliar background - Love is the begetter of intimate knowledge. can always be produced where a creative imagination is wedded to an acute intellect ... depends on the act of becoming conscious itself ... It is the momentary apprehension of the poetic by the rational, into which the former is forever transmuting itself .... This is the very moonlight of our experience. Language is fossil poetry - says Emerson. When we read Plato, even Shakespeare, their language is light from a star of another time, ie we cannot hope to know what they understood by it.
The making of metaphors is by far the most important. Owen Barfield 1928 Poetic diction We have to project on the world opinions still peculiar to ourselves,
My hardest lesson. I expect to come approved already and understood already. What a joy if peculiarity Prose = not-poetry, ie secondary - I'm afraid that what will happen with Maggie is a mutual mucky flab; she's not my rightful enemy as Paul was, and our connection lacks the tonus; unless I could learn some just issues. I miss my warrior self. I have 'flashes' with Maggie. Desire, inarticulate, when I looked at her mouth as she sat across the table from her mother. I love her stoned prophet. - Deep End and subsequent dreams: this morning there are still images mixing from both. Jerzy Skolimowski dir 1971 Deep End In the dream of being 'at home,' feeling it possible to live there a longer time, a conspiracy with Mother, she wants to escape from Him. A wall of plants, I notice the grapefruit plant (Paul's) has many dead leaves, which I count (parallels counting the new leaves they got when Maggie came), I think it is because they are next to a cold wall. In my dreams Mother never fights for herself, I have to fight for her. This is one of the keys to the pattern. I was fighting to help her leave him, there were little indications, unconscious at the time, that she wanted to stay. She discussed with me the best time to go, how many boxes we'd need (7), how to ship them so he couldn't trace them; then he appeared from the bedroom behind her. I don't know if she knew he was there (parallels the dream I had of Judy betraying me for him), but it forced me into a confrontation with him. Nobody would stand up to him. I had in me the whole responsibility of defending Paul, Rudy, Mother, myself. Judy by virtue of sex appeal was exempt. What a family romance! Die now, old man. Let me inherit your farm, as some compensation. My feminism is rooted in Mother's oppression. He turned into --- when I challenged him to leave Mother alone - a charming young man with aggressive sexy good looks, something of Elias in him, something of the teacher in Deep End - I seem to have poked at him with a long stick and maddened him. At the end I thought it was wise to
and ran through the neighbour's yard, where various men had gathered as if cued, for me to run past, partly naked, hoping they would protect me from what they would think was rape. Running away and invoking uncertain protection of other men seems a regression to me.
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