| dames rocket 2 part 2 - late fall 1975 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Miriam Xios, reading (pre-Socratics) in spectacles, at a kerosene lamp, looks up before I have reached her door. She looks toward the path to the point where I am, although the rain is loud and I have no footfall - I do not knock, therefore, and she holds her place in the book. I have brought her some photographs wrapped in plastic, which I shake at the door. Take off my wet hat and set it on the drying rack over the woodstove. I take a cup from the cupboard, pour coffee, pour cream. Enquire. She says no. I bring myself to the table. She has been looking at the photographs. They are of the swimming pool. She says "You're afraid these will incriminate you" and she smiles. At the top is a photograph of the glass ceiling, white at parts. "What does it mean?" [2012] There were clouds passing overhead; each pane with its angle took a different color from the cloud - it is a picture to show and do outtakes. Say. This picture is here. This is what it hides. The airplane I didn't get. The birds too quick to catch.
The order is a choice of life, I want it potent but not predictable, a strangeness that hangs together. Who could imagine this, a foreign grammar another country. These will incriminate you, because they will say you are a simple mind, not of this century, not urban, without genius or presence, an adolescent with curious persistence in ecstasy that is unintelligible.
There are places we needn't be taught to reverence. The swimming pool is a temple and a prayer, it is an architecture of prayer, it is saying, in this place every surface is potentially luminous - the structure of a meditation is what I want, absolutely that, to get into it and see, and hum, frequencies, let's have densities and clearings, slownesses, speeds, darknesses and lightnesses. A structure of ecstasy - the boys at the end praying too - maybe the roof more in the middle. Miriam says Good, that's an idea that doesn't betray you, but you don't know yet what are the densities and clearings, textures you could call them. Are you talking about sonata form? If you are you have to identify what is the slow movement. Describe the pictures to me. 1) Two young boys are sitting in a rectangle lit wonderfully in its upper corners. They do not look at the camera. Offside a blue curtain rustles as another person behind the blue curtain rustles, fidgets. The boys are serene, hold their hands up to an invisible warm rain. The colors are clear blue and yellow. There is a lot of space in the frame, this is an open airy image. It is serene. It is relatively brief. It is framed as a rectangle. After black it would be a spacey picture. Also it has distance, a downward looking perspective. Easy to read. Some external relations, to the blue cubicles. To the water? Thereby. 2) The ceiling. It is sculptural. There's plenty to see in its changes of light. They maybe don't change enough. There is the gradual inward pan. We're oriented pointing upward. There are a few strange details, the bush, the various missing panes. Edge wavers. Sound for the one locates us on the ground, for the other - ? Sound should be different. The second version has a question about it of similarity or difference. If the sound is different will it seem to be more different than it is? Our movement here is a very subtle rising movement, plus a flow past - white, blue, orange, subtle, maybe boring for many, although lovely in itself. It is a relatively rigid surface, with a limited depth, references that may be too subtle to get. It relates to the earlier image of the bubble crossing through. That one will have trained the eye. A little. 3) The surface of the water with a triangular grid on it. It is still and starts to move. It has a bubble travel slowly through it. It is relatively dark and dense, agitated in its movement. The bush reflection is mysterious. It is close-up. 4) The reflection intensely beautiful light. MOSTLY preview sound before you hear it again - in whole or part?
5) The boy swims through water, walks past in a flash of color, very rich, could stand to be brief, or else to be repeated - close-up - they may be straining to see the reflection again.
6) Tile sections - what are the differences in the two sections. One is richer than the other, has white scribbles on the surface. Both go darker as they slow down. It is hypnotic, yet there are things to see. Busy - close-up - dense. Close down dark. White scribbles refer to rich before. 7) Box under the stairs very fine light, still, almost the apex of quietness, rectangle, waiting. The splash from below, sheer painting. Could have the distance swimming laps planted there. 8) The murky footprint. Illegible greys blacks whites, something happens, a footprint disappears, but it is extremely muddy although interesting. Will go on too long. Too close. Questionable. 9) Diagonal view of water, the booths with curtains and mirrors shining lovely colors. This may be one to repeat if in fact there's anything there - gives the impression of nothing happening. (What will be the relation of the length of the sound to the length of the picture?) V blue and turquoise. 10) A small patch of water randomly entered and exited by swimmers, impression of a net. Not a beauty but the idea of setting a rectangular trap and a time trap and seeing what comes into it. Dense, close, not seductive easily. The film as a trapline: I set out some rectangles and see what comes into them. The dark is a rectangle too. I make that apparent by repeating a sound area as a block. Traps set in a light palace, traps set in a temple for light. But the traps are set to be filled by certain beasts in certain known terrain - that is what I make with the sequence. Have to think very carefully about how much black to use, should it be uniform, has it the property of making the listener reflect on what she has just seen. Final image should be followed by a black that goes into final tail. A questionable dark of 50 sec or so. Time. - Miriam says It seems to me that what you need is a job having to do with fish. Go to SFU and talk to Abby Schwartz. It seems to me, also, you need to test out empirically some poetics of the film image. You need to be busier. Miriam, as it was raining, offered her couch for the night. She went to bed early but I saw the light under her door for as long as I was awake, and that was a long time, for I was filled with quiet attention and lay with my head on the stiff chintz cushion from her armchair, covered with several quilts, and looked about me. There were no street lights to catch in rain on the window glass, the wide reach of it held black, and sound of a continuous rattle on the low roof; I could see little of the furnishings, but there was a smell of dried fruit in the house, that seemed to give the room a warm color. I remembered where things were. The couch along one wall, facing high windows with a broad window ledge, fireplace at the end of the room, a large chair, from which I had the cushion, a sewing machine (treadle) under the window, which has plants set on its sill. There is a light in the crack under Miriam's door, which is around the end of the wall where the couch is. Some picture behind glass is gleaming - only the glass - on the wall opposite the fireplace. I know there are rugs underfoot. It seems a prairie farmhouse, it is not a cozy house in the style of Auntie Jay. In the morning - I haven't long, it is early, and bright, the rain has stopped - I wake when Miriam goes through the room to get something from across the room, I think it is her box of tackle. She sees I'm instantly alert and invites me with a nod to come fishing with her. She has a grey raincoat on, a Norwegian knit cap on her white hair, grey slacks and gumboots. I am dressed quickly, my clothes have dried at her fire. I leave my hat behind (I forget it there in fact and when I see Miriam again she has appropriated it: it is a brown felt gentleman's hat, when it's rained on it leaks water stained the color of tea). She opens the door, front door, with less noise on the latch than I manage, we go out, the hems of our coats scattering a lot of water from various small-twigged bushes standing close around the door. She leads the way past her circular walled garden, fenced for deer, in the meadow. We take a path diagonally downhill, to a barbed wire fence we breach: she puts her foot on the middle wire and holds up the top strand - I lean through in the manner my legs remember well, turn and hold it in the same way for her. She gathers the long skirt of her raincoat around her thighs and gets through neatly. We're into bushes now, but then there is the escarpment, with sheep trails on it, an oak forest at the bottom, a stand of pine, and then the rocky coast, where Miriam, arriving ahead of me, squats on a boulder, takes the thermos from her pocket (yes her pocket) and pours us strong milky tea. She shares the thermos' top. She baits a hook without conversation, flings it somewhat carelessly into the sea, sets the string around her fist, and looks around her. Level ocean, almost glassy. It's not warm, there are crows in the stand of pine. A gull and a crow are walking on a pebbled strip further up. Her eyes follow them. She's laughing but she leaves me to see them or not. After a little time she casually hauls in her line and there is a plump reddish fish on it. That's mine she says, hands me the hook and the bait, and walks off up the coastline. I see her disappear around a corner. I find the bait, manage to get some of it on a hook, throw it in as casually as she did, take off my raincoat and sit crosslegged on it with the string wrapped around my fist in her manner. I sit motionless, the crows have left, even the gulls are elsewhere. The glassy water, green as it is, rocks very slightly. I watch the light on it, I lean forward and rock on my coccyx with it, it's the heartbeat pendulum, I begin to cry and continue to cry for a long time, water washing down my face in waves. What am I crying for? I am paying my debts. I am acknowledging the betrayal of my daughter the blackheaded girl, I am remembering wasted time, I am fearing my own faintheartedness. I am pitying the tiger. I am feeling sorry for myself. My line pulls. I bring in my fish like bringing down a kite, hand over hand. I am not very interested in the fish, who is similar to Miriam's, not large, but meaty. The fish is glaring at me. I clout its head nonetheless, with the back of Miriam's hatchet. I lay it with Miriam's dead fish and empty the vacuum flask down my throat. I feel better. Miriam arrives musing over various pebbles I don't find especially interesting. We carry our fish back to the house with a finger stuck through the gill. At the top of the escarpment Miriam suggests we gut the fish and leave something for the crows. We fry our fish and are merry, the climb has made blood frisk through our faces, we are silly and tell grape jokes, also the one about the long-playing omelette. After breakfast she sees me to the door and I hug her, but briefly, respecting her privacy. I go down past her garden, but on the long path not the diagonal path, greet the horse at the gate. The fish has given me a muscular energy that I don't know what to do with. I don't know what to do next. - "What love?" I said to her. Twenty times a day I need to tell her I won't love her. It grieves me. I remember Tony saying of Gwennie "I told her this morning that every time she says she loves me it makes me sick."
In sadness visualized my tiger, her heavy tread, whipping her tail on the floor, her small arc, the bars, her growl. Swinging her head right and left. Then I saw the two killer whales and their dolphin chasing each other colliding sometimes, beating their tails making every extension of their bodies with every change in direction. Pacing power and flying power. "A public image that has been crafted throughout her life." Collins on Brico. Brico playing honkytonk in the company of a number of young women. Duras. Method. Images génériques. What is générique? Elemental - parc, étang, terrasse, interior, woman, cat, radio bulletin. Plan fixe, panoramique lent - Images génériques: A woman with a broad hunched back, soft thighs, standing with her back to us taking off a sweater, revealing a sharp backbone. She has on underpants that are cut to leave out the sideways pad of upper thigh - she bends over, her body is so strong on its widely planted legs, we marvel at its privacy. Such bodies are never offered to our eyes. She gets a nightgown from under her pillow, puts it on, gets into bed and becomes before our eyes a virgin missionary vulnerable on the pillow, small delicate face and shoulders, all hunched strength under the covers. Her mouth makes a mousey pout. She looks at us through glasses that are circles of white reflection. The camera moves sideways, then down. She reaches to turn off the light leaving a blue glow. The camera jerks aside to let a woman, the back of her head, drop onto the bed next to her, we see the back of her head only, while the missionary, who is a little drunk, plays with the faceless woman who's acting Barbie Baby - "I try to be nice to everybody," gets dismissed. We draw back enough to see the woman's face as she gets up to leave. Miz Missionary puts a stern face into a magazine. The other person is followed into the room adjacent where she's seen writing in a book. Pan the room, hear a train, rainy street noises. Heap of clothes on the floor. Simone Weil and piled papers on the bed. Turns her head sideways as the pan reaches her again, and her gaze refers us to a kitchen doorway. Cut upstairs to dark view of child sleeping in a littered room, dims out altogether. A bathroom, a livingroom, a basement. Single views of - glances at. Theme - two rooms and their environs. The inhabited country of the house. Theme - unexpected intimacy with unpopular bodies, impact, revulsion, curiosity, respect for one-shot independent existence. - Anne Hébert - Les chambres de bois 1958 first novel. A gothic novel with touches of "sensual apprehension" like Colette. Written in short chapters, 2-4 pages, 167 in all. An imprisoned princess story. The gothic is one way of seeing my own father - sister - place - gothic is maybe natural to childhood. It is a style that comes more naturally to me than discursive American - strong presence of smells and isolated colors. (Humour, character - are they constructions of resignation?) - This Saturday morning, Luke away, I dreamed vividly that I am on a flat-bottomed launch/ferry, looking through a window toward a silhouetted building (it is night) on the horizon to the left - she is telling me that it is on a precarious footing - I say Look I think it's sinking now - it is, slowly at first then more quickly, as I see it go under I think there will be big waves reaching us now, we should fasten ourselves. The first waves are small, just swells, we watch out, not knowing how many of them there will be, and without any idea how big to expect them to be. Then very large waves arrive, widely spaced. We think it is the last one, but peer through the darkness to the south and east (I think) (southwest from my position in bed) and see a gigantic black-green wall moving across the water from one end to other of it. We watch more in interest than in fear, calculating where we will meet the wave. We go up it like an elevator going up a skyscraper, I see green water at the window behind us too. Then it seems we have weathered it. We are on shore in sunlight, at a cream coloured powerhouse? The wave has passed over and left us dripping. We ask the man if everyone on land has been destroyed. He says not at all. Two associations. The book about flu epidemic killing everyone, and the Krakatoa tidal wave. In Anjer, on the west coast of Java, a retired sea captain suddenly noticed a new island that had bobbed up in the strait. The next moment he was running for his life. The island was a wall of water, 50' high, advancing across the narrows at incredible speed, battering down the wharves, engulfing Anjer, racing uphill, smashing everything in its path. The wave flung a log at him and he went down. When he regained consciousness, he was sitting on the top of a tree half a mile inland, stripped of every shred of clothing but otherwise unharmed. He was one of the few who saw the wave and lived to describe it. Tsunami. Springing from the ocean bed above the focus of the earthquake, it can stretch scores of miles and race along at speeds up to 500 mph, pushing the ocean water before it. As the tsunami approaches land, the first sign is likely to be a sharp swell, hardly different from an ordinary wave. Then there is an enormous draining withdrawal. The ocean floor gapes open, exposing a litter of stranded fish far beyond the furthest ebb of low tide. Finally the gigantic wave, which may reach a height of 200', comes crashing in. - Well, marsh-wader, my swee-tart brother, Paul Kinsella: it's Monday, I'm tired, I've gone to bed at 8 o'clock and am laughing reading your journal - "I despise birds today." I'm weak and full of ginger snaps and tea, it hurts to laugh. - H.D. "a wish to make real to myself what is most real." At the beginning of Helen in Egypt I'm hoping for a wo-man Sepheris to teach me my form. The silent room is trivial in its mythology, but its brevity appeals to me very much. Each chapter opens and closes like a shutter opening and closing. Style like my rapturous writing - especially the fairytale. Anne Hébert 1975 The silent rooms Paper Jacks - In my dream I visited Rosalynd, took her in my arms, undressed her, caressed her lean back; we got into bed, but the kids came home, so we got up. I examined their paint job carefully, there were places where the original color showed through (the dark blue in the kitchen). Eros is aligning itself with friendship in me. Hébert: His long body crashed down upon her, heavily, like a tree. the plenitude of joy that spread over her skin like a nasturtium in bloom For a moment they stood apart, heads lowered, under the olive trees, like solitary monks bowing to each other. The servant retreated a step, turned her head away, murmuring painfully, almost fearfully, "Madame is too beautiful." "Look straight at me, Aline, please, and say that again." "Madame is too beautiful, it cannot last ..." "Touch me, Aline, I'm alive and it will last as long as God wills it!" She grasped the old, knotty, trembling hands between her own, laying them on her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids. The hard hands lingered on Catherine's forehead, which for that second was girded by a narrow, iron crown. Catherine spoke in rapid sentences like a volley of stones. Mar-gar-et, the country woman, takes my place in the farm childhood. When I think of her as myth of literature I get so excited - she gathers up Janeen, Olivia, Penelope, there's such a glamour in her for me, I lend her an accumulation of thrills. "When I was twelve my brother wanted to fuck me but I said no." Someone to take on the intimacy of my own gothic story. A coalescence. -
- Abby Schwarz, when I opened the door, meeting my eyes and telling me "Actually, make it twenty-five minutes" in a clear American accent that thrilled me with its authority. Vision of personal form for fish documentary.
- peregrine falcon - Dead, dead language! Dinesen - old woman as falcon - angry yellow eyes - Telescopic style "requires absolute control, psychological insight, an unwavering concept of character, and an unerring sense of the significant detail." - In bed, having slept, woken by ripples of firm music coming from M's guitar (under the door) looking around at the white darkness in my room and the corridor. Remembering laying myself out in bed, clothes on, light on, as if to wait for a message, which came and was real for only a second. Made me think of a flash of a square: but smaller than that, more the size of a stamp. Where will you spend eternity What are you doing with your life Death What is the meaning of your life How will your life be weighed against a feather Thought - ah! is that what's behind my malaise? Thinking of the young girl I find in the journal - hopeful, radically sure of herself and her great promise, ethically pure - uncompromised by anything, free of family, tender, careful, competing with high standards.
The square and its message instantly were unfelt again, the speed making me feel I was witnessing a repression. Quickly thought about social work (the hungry), some kind of writing. What are the world's essential services? We don't learn that in school. Also those are the easy answers. The hungry - that one most of all (Schweitzer and the second half of his life, Jill Chisholm) Practical action - mercury poisoning Martyrhood to fear of food etc. Writing - sensory specialist - not many openings there. Not easy to feel justified. Serving god - the Bahai exit, alright except for the belief. But it's clear I need something I am a body with uncommon energy A body with well developed integration of feeling and senses I am capable if motivated of thinking solidly I thrive on competition and necessity; challenge I require very high standards to move me at all I am not good at self motivation - relapse if I don't see the necessity My body responds quickly to yoga and breathing disciplines I am rebellious, don't tolerate regularity or predictability I am quick to learn things, balk easily if I don't analyze a sequence properly, again lack of necessity It kills me to work at such a low level, rate Am happiest alone in a strange place with some definite challenge - that's the formula I am not suited to family life I need romance infrequent and intense I need travel and change I need a sense of a real future I need a very tangible, concrete, difficult, worthwhile JOB outside my cultural work, which is too amorphous - I need to believe in this job -
Helen Andelin 1963 Fascinating womanhood Random House - I am haunted by the age and illness in my face these days; there's a heavy listlessness in me, a weight of indifference that feels like a crisis. Everything I think to do seems too much trouble, or trivial. I am rebellious. I am bitter. My bitterness and indifference distress me. I feel ashamed of my face, and indeed of my whole state, as if my face betrays having come gradually to a dead end I've only suddenly seen. Is there a way out? I flail around. This is a hard time. The fourteen year old in the journal was sometimes pretty, thought about being pretty all the time, but was sure she could write, and did, with all assurance and invention. Inside a tradition. I am a-cultured, I am straying between cultures, I cannot tell my shrewd intransigence from my fear of failure, my inertia. I meet Maggie with unloving resistance: that is part of my real, very real, trouble. I am ashamed to be out of love, ah, I'm ashamed and grieved, under me the river weeps all day, betrayal, sorry, ow, and the defiance of it, I lecture her to hear the message myself, you are not confident. Being in love, erotically, with her, was my virility, I knew my body was alive. Unloving, the trapdoor has slammed shut, I cannot find the brown, muscular roots, again. There are too many people I don't feel for. There are too many poems I don't feel at all. I feel Luke sometimes, but hold back hold back - I don't know how to live otherwise! Go take Luke a cough-pill Acerola. A sense of debts and their psychological interest: the library books, for instance, little things I haven't organized right, money I don't want to pay because I don't see the necessity, but the psychic debts remain and they are wearing me out.
It may be that I don't need confession and reparation as much as I need to be convinced that living outside the law is arduous, wearing, an admirable experiment that needs the best health and physical conditioning and psychic debts paid by generosity. Honesty when it's real. Paying my way in small ways. - Lessing. Ella and Paul, their shadows. Hers the good, strong, grown-up woman (she projects it on his wife); his the bad, womanizing rake (he projects onto men she doesn't know). Positive and negative selves. Again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivete, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naïve Anna is re-created in me. What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivete. Lessing underlines. There's no group of people or type of intellectual I have met outside the Party who aren't ill-informed, frivolous, parochial, compared with certain types of intellectual inside the Party ... this intellectual responsibility, this high seriousness. Lessing's impeccable intellectual training, her specialization. I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created "Frontiers of War." I've been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguisable private emotion. Perhaps the individual conscience is also a child learning how to walk. p.350 But humanism stands for the whole person, the whole individual, striving to become as conscious and responsible as possible about everything in the universe. Doris Lessing 1962 The golden notebook Harper Collins - Theodore Roszak 1968 The making of a counter culture, or may have been Where the wasteland ends 1972 the urban-industrial pattern suave technology - the corporations stepping around national parliaments the ethos - of a big corporation "advertising, public relations, mass media imagery" technocratic styles: suave; vulgar (eg USSR); witch-doctor suave hybrids such as Brazil and South Africa; comic opera (Amin) It's clear I have some identification with the 'world': its future interests me. - On the bus the other day I understood 'persona' for the first time: it is not the self conscious acting that aims to impress or ingratiate, as I thought it was; it is what we are all the time except for flashes, when we are the Oracle, and that intoxicated speaker is not our true self either. Persona has to do with consensus reality. "Early on, Jung developed serious reservations about the Reality Principle." Blake - single vision, alienation, orthodox consciousness Headline on newspaper (back page) in a Heather Street shop window (pegged to a line with clothespins): Artist uses Self Hypnosis, guy paints when he has knocked himself into the underworld with three phrases he repeats to himself. "Mind broadens of its own accord into universality and we re-enact each night the mythical identities." amnesia Coffee as a dose "whose purpose is to expunge their dream experience" - caffeine the chemical adjunct of modern science dreams - p.78 - we ask ourselves - how does it work? what caused it? Not what is it like? Thanatos - the body's need to live out its organic destiny, to ripen and die - this is what in the body may be most repressed. Single vision imperializes the body. "organic time - the time of maturational cycles" "restive with this diminished self we have become" Calvin - "The mind of man is a perpetual manufactury of idols" - Vision of history by way of sensory predominance Rather, the object on which the so-called idolater fixes his devout attention is transparent to the senses that contemplate it. It is a window, both seen and seen through. The function of any so-called idol, authentically perceived, is to give local embodiment to the universal presence and power of the divine. It gathers up that presence as a lens gathers up light diffused in space and gives it a bright, hard focus. Animism, as a brilliant experience of my healthy childhood The 'Old Gnosis' - the old way of knowing, which delighted in finding the sacred in the profane. Pascal "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces that know me not, I am frightened." Not obscure, but radically, authentically, enigmatic Symbol - "seeing in things material and sensible a formal likeness to spiritual prototypes of which the senses can give no direct report" The modern intellectual obsession to create a totally scientized culture Bacon "leave behind the haphazard sort of knowledge that comes of endlessly assembling and reassembling elements of custom and tradition." - I want to complain: this is a vacuous trip. [first time I take mushrooms] Some insights - that my nose is not only crooked but actually deformed: the right nostril has not held its own and the vigor of the left nostril has pushed it over - is it possible that polio has made other irregularities - in my hemispheres for instance. Fear that it - this from the man on the train who first pointed out that any local fault would strain the whole body, which has been designed to be symmetrical. Maggie loves me. Paul loved me. Well, that tells me I have something these two not-at-the-top, not-at-the-bottom people need. So. I'm not at the bottom. Why should I care. What am I here for. Any answer to that - like "to push back human ignorance" etc - is just arbitrary. I am suddenly feeling some existential thing about, well, in that case (a coy queer voice) it's wonderful to be able to just sit on some stool and say "I'll be here for the sake of pushing back human ignorance." That's real adventure. I don't feel any of what I'm saying. My face in the mirror was impressing me with its plastic materiality. It hangs on the two nails of my eyes - gravity takes it. That was not so when I was young. Gravity had not touched it, and it was not plastic, it was stone and clung to its centre - ie gravity was located differently. The young body, the young being, gravity pulling it tight toward its essence. The old being, gravity takes it. Levity? Roy getting old, gravity on a stone? Pulling the whole of it. Ah it is the firmness of the eye's position that makes it sag. I am looking toward my unstoned state and seeing it as a stoned state, a level - the fish held tight against the aquarium glass by the photographer's second sheet of glass - a slice - as a slice that is so self-referenced opaque - it thinks it is It. the standard, the control tower. What's happening is that I'm seeing the thoughts I have and don't use, they don't come into my faction - action - fiction, for instance this handwriting could be my habitual one, if something loosened. - No one can tell they're mad unless they're told, where we are is It - the control house. Persona is deep - it is a personality - it is not a mask, it is a whole actor. And that It, locus, is like a note in a scale, it can be sung at any pitch - the whole scale could be moving like a rocket from one end of the Milky Way to the other and the note would have no way of telling. And us with the earth's movement. We are weird we are weird. We think a lot of ourselves. The difference of degree between us and the drunk Indians, the old housewives, is the difference just the sort of words we have in our heads? Those words make us look different - they make gravity treat us differently. In Vancouver we can't talk about the way we see a certain kind of Indian. It would be racist - but they are identifiable as a group, their faces are bulbous, their bodies are bulbous too, they seem to have affection for each other, they are not noble warriors, is there an Indian in me that wants attention too. A drunk Indian woman made bisquity as they are, or certainly an aesthetic different to what we've used on ourselves - she is staggering out of a bar or else she's arm in arm with a small round man like herself, with a face that is a disaster of blobs pulled down by gravity.
- In the Dark I've thought of - wishing I could see Don at the airport in Toronto - my ichthyologist and wanting to have an intimacy with her - Rosalynd also - maybe this mushroom is a truth serum? - Mae - I was disappointed by her persona - she made herself opaque and not thrilling - she was defended - she had changed her mind and bored me deliberately. It is not just me, but everyone else, who has no necessity to be who they are.
Writing to Don to say meet me there and go into a thing about Olivia and remember myself and say - as I'm no longer a heterosexual (don't have to play by the old rules - I can ask for intimacy with whoever I choose - if they be chosen -
What these people have in common is just an access to a certain style of consciousness that I like better than others. Simple. I'm no longer heterosexual. What a ploy. Ha. Now I can be friends with Don! Thought of my photograph of Maggie. Thought of how she was in the red lamplight the night before she went to Saturna, and we were so nice and warm in bed together before she got up early and put on her packsack and went out the door and I went back to sleep. Thought of her hands. Her odd combination of stocky body and delicate head and hands. The way her body is set. "I'm a game forty-year-old," hey! you, Maggie, I'm smiling all over my face when I think of her - There was an unperceived switch from you to her because as I was still writing, my thought had moved ahead to contemplate how I had been able to drop Paul like a plate - as I had Ian - that's not a moral issue, Paul, you can be angry but not at me. Thought of my photograph of this woman with her hand over her mouth, thought - ah - this marvel is accessible to me. This marvel with her mouse-mouth, her hair down over her face, no heaviness in her - gravity got to her breasts, but nothing else - this wo-man! Wow, I can touch her! Paul: your grievance, your sense of grievance, is what I am gleeful at having escaped, in a relationship that isn't sexual you don't have the right to it, it isn't mandatory to your pride. - The Vegetable Glass of Nature - Blake Romanticism - take it up with Rosalynd
- Goethe: "The human being itself to the extent that it makes sound use of its senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist." "Had I not myself ceaselessly pressed forward to the archetype, though at first unconsciously, from an inner urge; had I not even succeeded in evolving a method in harmony with Nature?" "The greater your Being-Love of the person, the less your need to be blind" says Maslow. "He worked from the qualities - always from the qualities: color, texture, above all form ... the sweet nourishment of the senses." Roszak on Goethe - "exact sensory imagination" "For alchemy, being a science of meanings, is the science of qualities ..." R Goethe invented and named morphology "the spirit of rhapsodic intellect ... awareness of resonance" Big Science
Goethe Metamorphosis of plants - How to imagine a woman I could become -
"Geruda; the divine vulture, the vehicle of the yogis" Kathleen Raine's essay "Symbolism" in Defending ancient springs Every naturall Body is a kind of Black Lanthorne, it carries this Candle within it, but the Light appears not, it is Ecclips'd with the Grossnesse of the matter. The Effects of this Light are apparent in all things; but the Light it self is denyed, or else not followed. Vaughn Anarchist socialism: Kropotkin, Malatesta Kropotkin "took his model of nature from the peasant and tribal communes of the Siberian frontier." Anarchism "the political style most hospitable to the visionary quest," "meditative community of the ashram" Tagore The religion of man - Luke brings a little wooden mouse and speaks to me in its squeaky voice. "Hello Ellie." "Hello little mouse, you're very pretty." "Shiny hair." (We washed L's hair today.) "Yes and lovely ears. What are you going to be when you're a big mouse?" "I'm going to just be a mouse." "But you could be something, you have to be something when you're a big mouse." "I'll be a rat ... goodbye now I'm going to see the cat."
|