| dames rocket 2 part 3 - december 1975 - january 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Hello book. 19 December 1975. White and grey, up in the orchard where we live at Eton and Slocan. The west window has snow, white fence, snow, yellowish car tracks, white picket fence, trees in fainter and fainter grey, the cherry trees. A bird came diagonally through, from the far corner: growing larger, growing darker grey, out of nothing, flying higher, and out at the upper left. The snow lasting so many days, giving us sun and sea fog, gives me memory of the happy child in me; and the mushrooms do that too. I find a smile on my face, and do not want to talk. The clarity and good nature of my fourteen year old - Bachelard says our anxieties are social, and we can take them off like clothes. I love him for his confidence in the solitary dreamer who expands rocks in her belly. The opposite of what Paul says about contracting into an egg-rock black hole. The pebble plant that blossoms, stones blossoming over a whole landscape. My struggles with Maggie tying me into the social, her ploys, conversational gambits, reproaches, invitations to 'talk' and the talk I give sits like bricks, no, like wrapped shoe boxes which are not opened. When I talked with Paul across the table at the art school our postures, after a while, especially his, became free, personal and dramatic - he hunched at the edge of the table leaning against his two fists drawn up to his chest - that was the black hole contraction. Then his eyes shone and he threw his arms wide and almost shouted. Maggie should sue me for breach of promise. I should arrange a reparation. I faulted on my contract. In good faith? I want her to be happy and live privately and leave me alone and I like to have her projects going on. I like the sense of her tools. I like to hear her guitar. I like the Anaïs Nin she reads. I just want her to be less given away because it is inevitable she will be angry because of it. I don't like her social persona, I tell her that; it doesn't interest me. For the social I need some brilliant people, I need people who scare me and force me. For herself, in herself, I'd like her to genuinely withdraw, without rancour. Ah it's too much to ask, what help does she get? No, she's a warrior and she is faulting too. I should sue her for stopping my passion by feeding it sugar lumps. My tiger! Given sugar lumps, nice tiger, don't bite me, I'm too old and I've had a hard life and I'm a game forty year old, but I'm mad at being game, I want to let go and suckle. Well I know that crying woman too. Paul is handling his infant self now. Did I sophisticate him in the end? I think I did, but he was that before. Only sillier. Here's a pageful of the social. I want to write what I do, daily diary. I want to do self improvement exercises on the lines of language, gesture, etc. The white season - sometimes it is the dark season; although spring is blacker. Oh Tony Nesbit, when you came into the living room where I had waited patiently for weeks and said "Sleep with me," your cold bed and how you warmed it. In the last winter, when I didn't sleep with you, you slept in the front room next to the gas fire. M and her doggedness. Bulldog and boxer we said. Marnie, drunk, at the dinner table, her voice rises. "I'm walking around with wet panties all the time because of Mark," she shouts. The Rossini Mass. M's doggedness and the way she misses the point are being debated in the dark. I'm glad it is not me. Movies, I'm going to be working. Trapline is assembled, I'll probably be working all next term, I am thrilled. Last night in the school basement [Emily Carr editing room] I assembled until 6:30 [AM], went home through the white maybe salt-tasting mist. What have I got on the roll - I'm scared it is too long. There is thrashing water sound, a beating that is coming nearer, titles come on, white chalk on a greyish green, with water below and a white rim, feet, bare legs walk through, have lovely hesitations, turns, go into the background, we are into black again, there is a closer beating, the track says OH and a shivering inverted image with blue lines through it is there, rather dirty. It is still for a long time, there is silence at first, then the sound of shouts, bangs, male and childish voices, birds, rustles. Sound goes off - 1 [count of] - picture goes off - a thrashing sound comes on - throughout the long black section the swimmer departs down far away and then comes back, we follow it, it takes a minute and a quarter. Sound goes off - 1 - picture comes on - 2 - a lot of triangles - 3 sound imposed in blue on top of a shaking water, a bubble passes through - sound goes off - 1 - black comes on - 2 - shouts sound comes on - 3 - a crackling with birdsong repeated in the dark, we listen to it for 30 sec - picture comes on of tiles at the bottom - they are not too interesting - it slows and darkens, the edges flash more, it is a composition of pearly colors with moving squares, over it a jet goes by, the sound is loud and too near - sound goes off - 1 - dark comes on - 2 - sound comes on, it is 10, like 2, but more children screaming louder, 30 sec - picture comes on, dark muddy blue water, swimmers pass through, come back from the other direction, gap, they pass through again, black comes on, we expect it to be long, it is very short, a breathless blue, green, white neon shaking broad bands like an Indian blanket, it's lovely, a pinkness enters and walks, with two legs, through the frame, we make it out as a person, then it happens again, it's a strong pleasure and we're interested and want to see more, but the whistle blows and it whisks off, black - long or short? - silence - long or short? - quickly an image like the previous image of the shaking tiles, not too interesting, slows down and darkens - is this the same picture? - sound has come on - has turned into a fairy floating scribble - 1 and a quarter minutes, sound has taken us to the distance and back - sound goes off - 1 - picture goes off - 2 - sound comes on - like w [?], but without swimming, the woman's voice at the beginning, very strong, and English - the dark is not short or long - 15 sec - then a baffling sort of composition, grey, with a white and blue stripe, only part of it is in focus - what is it? what scale is it? - is that a footprint? Sound and picture go off at once - in the black, OH comes on unmistakable from before, but continues where it left off, pauses, like a person come up from a great depth for air, sound goes off - picture and sound come on simultaneously, the picture is a roof, the geometrical struts, this time revealed solid, where before they were wavering - the sound is recognizable, it has been there before, the shower and birds, we wait for the jet, sound ties this to the earlier geometry, we are in a geometrical land, light contained in rectangles but wavering rectangles. The roof has rigid rectangles, and light very gradually changes inside the rectangles, it is a slow section, but with tension in the sound - is the frame sliding forward? what are the relations of the directions and planes? - after a long time, sound and image go off together - brief or long? - brief - parallel entrance - the 3 changing booths with mirrors, wear, corners, dark blue and turquoise - slow strokes regularly like / / / / / / coming nearer - both black out - picture comes in with a continuous shouting childish sound - the glorious light in a rectangular area - both black out - sound comes on - where's the picture? is it going to stay black? - a uniform crackle - close-up - 30 sec - both go off - picture comes on after 2' - there are the boys in the shower, sitting unselfconscious holding their arms up, we remember the crackle - it is utterly silent, no sound comes - 32' - sound goes off. Elements: Tensions - is there going to be sound? Is there going to be light? Is this going to be too long? Is it going to be short? The smallest events are given the most time. The most dramatic have the least time, there are a lot of tensions, fear of the darkness - which lets us hear - but the film gets kinder - we are taken out of water. Three elements, unpeopled water, peopled water, sky in triangles and rectangles. I'm longing to be interviewed on it! Owes something to behaviorist programmed theories of art. What's the book. Thanks to
It is an experimental documentary, ie it is dedicated to the thing, the place itself, I was in love with it, it revived and thrilled me. Experimental because it is looking for an ecstatic rather than informative form - a right relation to the place - a human relation of the puzzle - let us have light and then in the end they get it - but not too pat - they are reminded of dark - then they get the children integrated.
Trapline - a line of rectangular traps waiting for what passes - nets - prisms, windows, rectangles, triangles, pools, mirrors, lenses, set up mostly on the balcony with my hand on the cable release, in ambush, hunting. Fishing, trapping. All the information is there, obliquely, extrapolate to the whole. Trapping came later, coming to these rectangles and seeing what they have caught. Traps laid in various terrains, in one area. A knitted thing. - Images for Luke - a tree embracing a stone at its root. - My confusion, joy, pain, today, about whether to send Luke to England after all.
In bed this morning I had it again, the second time in my life, an understanding of Ellie Epp dying, not being alive any more, vanishing out of existence. The puppy and the kitten seem sinister; also pathetic. Will they tire of him? Will they want him for their real marriage? Will she protect Roy from the desperation of it so he can hang onto him? My courage. It would be good to stop contracting, I need a contact in this city. I need to roam around and not be frightened. On the beach, on the street, my spirits smiled briefly thinking of what I could do alone, yoga, travel, go to the islands, mountains, and forests, look for a place, work. My period must be due, I have such a distaste for my life. Thinking of Ashton-Warner saying it is her responsibilities as mother and wife and teacher that force her to study and write, otherwise, if she could do what she liked, there'd be no hunger. - M comes home and strokes my shoulders until I throw her off in revolt and storm out like a teenage daughter. "I'm just showin' you if you want any help it has to start with yourself." That was to justify the suggestion I do yoga regularly. The other suggestion was a private school. It's the familiar and sensible martyrdom of the household slave. It's the good woman. It's the reality principle. Christie saying "I've found that if I simply behave well, it is possible to go on" and turning old and ludicrous with it. These appalling bodies that accept, for the sake of security - they survive too. Do we die young? That's the superstition. Now I'm polarizing, I'm accepting the polarization. If I send Luke this time, and Roy does send him back, it will not establish my courage or his good faith. - I feel cheap. I loved M with full mythological depth, and then pushed her away in distaste, in distaste, having tried to use the archetype to write. I cannot write it anymore, I've lost confidence in it. I say "I feel I have a cheap soul" not feeling it, but suspecting it to be the truth of my flat sadness about this ugly Christmas. I feel unworthy of Luke too. Unwilling to get a tree, unwilling to make any plans. Losing faith in my archetypes. Perhaps they are not good gifts. - This time is reminding me of Peter Harcourt, the sense of a decision, yes and no coming like cards dealt out fast. Because there was an obvious answer, which is that Luke stays but M goes. At Frank's table, with my coat on for the cold, Paul catty-corner making jokes about catching my tears for making a potion, I found out what really is concerning me, by what makes me cry. "Miriam is lonely" he said. (My brother's name is Paul; he has a sister called Miriam.) "You have too much power and that sets you apart from people. You're a power-tripper, but that isn't obvious right away, and people don't realize it until it is a little too late for them to take a careful distance. You get the power, but it isn't what you want either, and that makes you sad." When he said I was lonely I cried. When I said I felt like a bad person, because I had first involved someone and then thrown them away, I cried too. He advises therapy. He is sad about not writing. He took beautiful pictures, in San Francisco, of intense light in his hotel mirror, on a skylight, on a wave reflecting sunset, a mirror shop with GLASS in red neon on two colors of sky, one blue, one yellow. - Does M understand my move upstairs, if she understands it, does she know she understands it? I've identified her / am identifying her more and more, with my mother, because they are both smart women who either are or deeply pretend to be, obtuse; self-sacrificing feeling creatures who are baffled by the wildness they evoke in their husband and children. She does things I feel as provocations, but they are unconscious and if I mention them she is just injured and indignant. She did understand my move, and my retraction of all my beautiful things from the ground floor, but she didn't know how insulted she was, and when she came up to look, she thought she was understanding and loving. "I can see this is something you need to do." But then, deciding to criticize Copernicus on the mirror, the injury came out and I had nothing on the manifest level to say to that. Just: I do not accept your complaint. It is true I am assaulting, and deserting, you, but damn you for being so custardy I couldn't love you any more, I liked loving and seeing you, and now you turn it into shame, disgust, repressed violence in us both, because you need to play the everloving sweetmeat wife, and won't take responsibility for the excitement and energy of the contact. And so I have contracted into a little hippy room with all my lovely things piled together to make up for the loss of my subtle eyes, and big white brain. - All day, again, it has been yes and no in a stupour of evil spirits, entrenched refusal of everything, a pathetic quality.
The fury that says no I do not belong here, no I will not cooperate, no I will not be part of that, no I will not accept. The thing that pulls back shuts down sulks does not risk itself, wants to be elsewhere. What do I know about it? It comes and goes. When it's gone, as when I was animating the arts co-op, I feel ashamed of extending myself less grandly or purely than I can be proud of. I get lost in the collages, they are a simple work I do not judge as I do it. When I was fourteen/eighteen I judged and refused silliness, basketball, but I lived approved by a few people I admired, I knew what I wanted to do, and it was likely I would do it. It was, I'm told by Life magazine, an optimistic time, innocent, before dope, Viet Nam, acid, rock, ecology, nuclear stations, riots. My age had a firm self-mythology, I was willing to read books like Marjorie Morningstar, I lived alone in a new place, was pretty and full of optimistic charm. Was socially acceptable for the first time, had Frank for a committed bedrock, and was obliquely courted by Peter Dyck. Dear shrink, I had a golden age and it troubles me to have lost it. Also I don't know what to do with my child, except wait. I am chemically depressed. I am lonely. I am full of doubts. I am sorry for myself and don't know how to rebuild the world to suit me. Also I am anemic! And black out when I get up too fast. List: what there is to be - what I have to be - mourning about:
I am caught in contradictions and can't see a way out. - Daycare party, Carol's tired bent greasy old husband with his beautiful dignified face. - Such a sentence! Luke is downstairs asleep next to the tree, on a blanket, with his quilt, coverlid and my black cloak thrown over him. I had the fire at my feet and sat in Paul's rocking chair to tell Luke the Christmas story he asked for (same one as last night, Joseph and Mary and the Donkey) and then I told him the legend of his birth. The yellow velvet pants he now wears are cut from those I wore when I jumped into the ambulance on the day I made cranberry jelly. Daycare party, drop in at Anna's workroom in an old office building on Granville, shopping for Luke: color polaroid camera, wooden truck, paper, compass for making circles, lightbulbs for the tree. As I thrust out my thumb on Powell, Paul came steadily across the road with an aim like elastic pulling back - in his big rain hat - was shining at me and at Terry, who stood facing him like two creatures of the same species for sure, that small-featured blondness a norm. Fought with Maggie this morning. She nearly came and punched me and I said "If you beat me I'll just beat you right back, Baby," she calls me a zombie and says I turn her into all kinds of things and make intellectualizations about what is happening instead of feeling - she's trying to name me as closed and cold in general, and I'm throwing it all back and saying look at this, it is between us, you are doing it too, you've lost your cool and spend your time either martyrizing yourself or resenting me, and it makes it impossible for me to relate to you. It began at breakfast when she said in that nursey voice "Did you sleep well last night?" and I wouldn't reply. It is like an instinct and I can't explain why I won't play nicely on that level. I could be civil. Why does it seem so unthinkable to be? A nice bearded bespectacled man selling wooden toys on the corner of Granville and Robson, earlier a lovely blond woman crocheting hats in the rain. He's from Grand Forks and we had or were beginning to have a good talk, needing news of each other's lifestyles, my hair stuck flat in the rain. The hitchhiking man went out of his way to give me a ride and let me off at the daycare gate. Sarah's mom, Silvia, talking about revolutionary politics. - Andy, we have lots of decorations in this box, at home, it's for Christmas. We're poor people (Ellie, are we poor people? No.) cause there isn't much good things in this country, I mean there isn't much good things tuh eat. (Can I have some milk please Mum?) So please can you send Luke a surprise. (Why are you laughing Ellie?) We have a kitten, we like it and he likes us and he likes tuh bite me and it doesn't hurt, he likes tuh bite his tail off. Cats for sale, cats for sale. [Sings.] I'm gonna say that when I'm grown up, at the market. I made a nice thing, duh, duh ... For the bible tells me so [letter degenerates here] poor pussy, dormez-vous .... Mum I wanna pray for the pussy. (Okay.) - Christmas Day a rushing sound, is it fumes in the wall-vent - rain rattling on window pane - two tall avocado plants on either side of the window - the Egyptian man/woman Self with night and left and right, but a different kind of night. Room full of Paul because he praised it, and the collages too. I don't think he understands them as well as Maggie or Leah, he said they were about 'the village.' Maggie amazed me with what she said about the birth collage: "There's death in it, in the red. The little girl in the front is like the spectator, I think it's you." Yes, exactly. What Paul said was "I was amazed that you could let it out, I think you must be well-rooted ..." - Luke interrupting - "... I think that was why I was feeling outclassed this morning." Why am I writing these supports when there was a day to describe: it feels like tissue degeneration, but perhaps gratitude for relief from the selfdisgust of past times. We walked in the rain this afternoon and evening, Granville, Hastings, all up Water Street and its lights, to a Chinese restaurant where I read Ms and ate, and Luke ate and looked around; we were happy as a transient family, the way we like to be, Luke on Granville in his Khaki parka and new lace-up worker's boots running /\/\/\/\/\ ahead of me and then coming and grabbing my hand and saying I love you Ellie I love you so much in the slightly affected baby voice that makes me wonder what he means. This pen is a handwork pleasure. The book too, size of lines is just right. Paul wants to win me, live with me, 'be a couple.' He does not understand that we would lose what we have, we wouldn't be able to escape the family romance. He wants to love and raise Luke. He's sexually alive to me, seemingly the way I briefly was to Maggie. I ignite - he is ignited, in my presence, in all his belly, as I was. (It is the only honest sex?) (When I am refusing him.) (No think of Tony, the slow tuning.) I try not to think of the one-way hunger in his body, I have to resent it if I do think of it, because it will maybe make us lose each other. I didn't ever hunger for him equally. Only in our Thai-land? We left each other today feeling gifts had been exchanged. I'm writing this in his voice. He tells me what I want to hear, quickly, ardently. He wants to win me. He is attending to me. He wants to win. He is full of faith - "From that base, think how we could both work, we'd be grounded" and he believes in his needs. Luke is not sleeping under the tree tonight, but in Maggie's bed, embracing two pillows. We had a fine Christmas day, it was really our own, I got up with Luke and watched him unpack everything, wooden truck, Robin Hood record, drawing paper, pair of compasses, crayons with bulb handles, roller skates, his stocking with jelly beans, jewel candies, candy canes, nuts, oranges and the green airplane, as well as the compasses and a large embossed sugar cookie, a right number of presents, on a right scale, to all be felt. Having breakfast with Paul was my present because he knows how it strains my self concept to make slightly glamorous meals, but we had fruit buns and real cream and two kinds of juice, red and yellow, and a whole pound of bacon, and stewed organic apricots, and new-tin MJB. Luke is so amenable, and sometimes so wired. Paul too is amenable, he was going to be angry last night, he was tempted to try to rape me I think, but he worked it out in himself and came down trying to be happy this morning, after grieving dreams, until he cried, telling me the dreams, and after that was really happy. I showed him two photographs, some of Luke's drawings, and Maggie's peppah plant poem, and my pueblo poem; he showed me photographs.
He is physically straight, 'bearing himself,' these days. "Yes I feel manly" he laughs. It gave me pleasure when he hugged me on arriving, he was in his boots and taller than I was. It fluctuates. He felt my hip with such a desperation to feel it before I stopped him, like adolescents - "I know you want me" he said and I said "Part of me wants you for sure," but felt cagey, or caged; because it was almost a just-permissive even what-harm-could-it-do wanting, and not what is meant by the word. Luke is a good person, in good connection with himself. I can safely send him to England. Both of these feelings have been strong and peaceful this afternoon. It is time to learn to trust Roy again, and time for me also to trust Luke and my own solitude. The passport will decide. - Notes to the conversation about this: he doesn't want me to identify with the power he gives me; ah! but equally he must not identify with it. He still thinks of it as his good gift, but it must be used to give him credit. 'He' in this case could be 'I' or anyone. I wrote a long letter to Roy today. Paul started to write a poem yesterday that starts "Oh villager, oh brown ---, oh vested interest"! We talked about the terror of opening, "Do you know what I thought that was, when I met you? I thought it was integrity." I stayed calm! And told him it was, too. And began to talk about being ashamed and burdened by what I've done with Maggie, because I wasn't careful, and enjoyed my good weakness. I had tears in my eyes then and he was immensely cheered up, and said that when I began to accuse myself he was able to console and to stop complaining. I hoped I wouldn't have to continue to be in trouble in order to stay harmonious with him. I am going to be in trouble again when Maggie comes back. The one who is identifying with not loving and the one who is identifying with loving. Tony didn't fail me. I didn't fail him. Frank and I, also. They refuse to identify with a victim. So did I. - Cold sore, sense of physical bulkiness and uncomfort, Luke has been hanging about. We've $2.00 for the weekend. Hm. - [This was typewritten - it fits approximately here] During the night it snowed; she got up to see to her son, who was sitting on the edge of his bed, with his light on, crying helplessly because he had spilt his pee-jar. She told him, through the door, to see to it in the morning. Called to him to turn off his light so she could come in naked. Sat on his bed, and looked out to the space around the street lamp on the corner, saw that snow was falling in its steady, familiar diagonal, and had already covered the street, with the lovely ground-lit change of season. She pointed it out to him, they watched it together very briefly, and she went to bed regretting she hadn't the life in her to stay up and look at it, and welcome it. In the morning the boy was up, consulted her about his clothes, went to the washline in the basement to find them (standing on a box) by himself, dressed, with a lot of tramping back and forth in the hall (that brought Maggie across to the door to shout at him), got himself outside to play with, to touch, the snow. Lying in bed looking at the white sky and newly bare branches, she could hear other children shouting on their way to school. - And then, dreams, this morning something about my father as a young, suave, dark man glamorously dressed in strange obviously expensive futuristic clothes. He attracts me in some way. I go away. We are in a certain large city. I cross the park and see a hotel I like, go up and look around, see precise detail of the architecture and the people who pass through, which I can't remember. (I seem to remember scenes from other dreams of rooms, and hostels, as I write this.) The name of the hotel is something to do with a Rose, red on the neon? My father follows me into the hotel, he has changed into another suit of strange but sleek and glamorous clothes - I shout at him, again, that he must leave me alone, because he has ruined me, made me unable to - something or other. I am wakened by a bang - Luke slamming his door - Luke the morning consciousness in this house - I try to go back to mulling the dream, and am wakened by the fireman pounding on the front door because Luke has locked himself out and is crying, in the cold sun, without his jacket. My father - who came after me in the hotel, finding me, like Roy, by his radar, and coming after me in silence. This Christmas, perhaps because of my crisis and Paul's talk, and the swami book, I felt let out onto a certain terrace of lucidity, that I sometimes reached in crisis with Roy, where I knew what doesn't matter, was fearless, and had composure. Nothing at all superficial: a vantage point, like a stone, which makes me see as if really from outside the social mind that muddles me when it catches me and I identify with powerlessness, paranoia. How often do I surface? surface / terrace Echoes of this in Room with a view - my first EM Forster - there's composure and lovely pity. I'm enchanted. Paul - with you if anyone - can I learn to speak the truth? Can I unlearn the speech of those with stones in their mouth? EM says those who speak like that have given up their heart's desire. They speak at a distance from themselves, like placards set up at the edge of the field, far from the house, saying "No peddlers, no agents, no hunting." - Jane Austen "You think the little Middletons rather too much indulged; perhaps they may be the outside of enough." "And this nourishment of grief was every day applied."
Jane Austen 1811 Sense and sensibility - Paul's journals - two, from the Toronto days after Akiko. Found little in them, he asks himself "Am I happy?" "Am I unhappy?" and pays no attention to inscapes. Also there are very few ideas in them, he's girlish, it's all to do with love and friendship. Shocked me when I read the scene where he takes off his sweater, and Mary takes off hers and unhooks her brassiere, and he takes it off and sees her breasts, which are the first breasts he's seen that have had a child. He tells her awful story, of a husband, and a pregnancy she was willing to abort, but he said oh no, that was alright, and when she got back from the hospital after having the child, wanted neither of them, as "it hadn't seemed real" before. Paul describes her wide, wrinkled nipples and her flat, thick dugs. Has Barbara left Steven because she is afraid he will leave her? When he analyzed the pro's and con's of leaving Akiko for a new woman it is ugly and honest. Akiko is 1. an outlet for his lust 2. a listener 3. has a car 4. is faithful (?). The other woman 1. may not be sexually satisfactory 2. has fat hips but 3. has big tits 4. has no car 5. may not be faithful. - How contemptible young men are. - But there are flashes of laughter at his own ego's expense, which is more than ever was in my young woman's books, for all their rapturous detail. He was hungering for a lady who was fair, slender, full-breasted, sexually his perfect mate, and who loved poetry and whose intelligence worked metaphorically. Ah, babies. Twenty four he was (the age when I went to England, all pretty and flattered, though losing my selfcontainment). I'm trying to think what the virtue of that person is - seems the negative virtue of being less obtuse than most Canadian young men. Danger. We live dangerously. What danger is it? Being mistaken. We sense the possibility of living perfectly, so that we are right, for our immediate and distant circles, so our lives are justified. The world is in danger. The world is mortal. The world is our metaphor. We are made that way. Is the universe mortal? Is it urgent in us to expand our metaphor. Oh universe, oh universe, I am not right, today because of the brilliance of the sky, and all its reflection on all things, I was intoxicated, and comforted myself buying comforts like the big blue sweater with a whale on it, the little green teapot round as a tomato, this paper box in purple paper-snake-skin, church candles, I am not right, there is nothing I do that is not shameful, there is no righteousness, I understand the need of salvation, and how could one man-god take on our guilt. Our guilt is our responsibility. We have guilty time. When we are children we are not living in guilty time. I understand it now. Universe, it is a panic, help me to find your perspective, enlarge me into your time, my parish is too large, forgive my paralysis, my parish is too large, what does it mean? Universe I'm waiting to be called, I'd be grateful for a clear message, oh universe, what do you care? About black people and starving children, and the miseries of women, and the miseries of families. We identify with a misery - the misery of Ireland - the misery of the unsaved - and we are happy because we are useful. We can identify with our best gift. What is our best gift? We may be waiting to find it by accident, we need to be famous. Which is it to be, our misery, or our best gift?
There's a maturity to be had? If we came into the world clear about what we could do, would we be pleased to do it? Universe - I am of so many minds Have you a preference? Universe - I would choose to serve you I would injure myself, and then comfort myself, in your service We are serious, we would be serious Are we to live as our bodies ask? Are we to transcend our condition? Are we to mine out reasons why anyone should be alive? Are we to feed the hungry? Are we to make patterns for those who haven't the comfort of hunger? Are we to hate the culture? Are we to love all we see? Universe! You seem to be asking a lot of us! Are we able to answer the question we can't ask? Are we, precariously mortal, to prevent deaths? Are we to wait quietly telling as few lies as possible? Are we to move through every day as a missionary of consciousness? Are we to stay lucid with the distance of star's light? Are we to approximate novelties? Are we to comfort our antecedents?
This book is not called Analysis for nothing. - New Years - Paul and I talk about our days - about Jim Bridges and his sad wife - "She sat down on the floor, she was wearing a sort of kimono, and wrapped a blanket around herself." But toward the end we read each other our accounts of yesterday, his detailed and personal, with a warm rhythm of storing-up in his book - his friend, a woman, a car, an unsatisfactory day. We had a mountain-blessed happiness in our accounts of unsuccessful journey together. Our two stories that we should have side by side, his and hers, that was our pleasure and present for today. We made up the reality of companionship. - New Years Day - dim sum with Paul and Luke; Stanley Park. When Paul walked up Main to meet us, he had his hair back in an elastic, and his hands in his pockets; he was a contained shape in his big black pea jacket, with only a shallow nimbus, he had a good focused look, aimed at us. Luke flew to meet him. The man on Pender, across the intersection, who scattered something onto the street from a plate. It turned out to be spare ribs. He took the plate back into a restaurant and came out again, furious and crazy. He had not liked his dinner? - Tasks:
13 ways of looking at a blackbird dictionary Amor and Psyche I can think of hieros gamos as the marriage of Amor and Psyche in myself, and thus stop being ashamed of it - my grief and struggle about it at the Sufi farm, where male and female were polarized into the genders, my ease about it with Paul. The evolution of the archetypes ends in their dismissal. - Robin Morgan. "Culture is breath to us as an oppressed people who have never before spoken in our own voice." - I have been crying today and formulating phrases to take to an analyst - I went to bed with Paul in his dark room at the Wonder Hotel in a state of grief. I felt I was giving up the comfort and support I have had with him, as my last friend, in order to prove to him that if he gets what he wants we will lose everything. I've lain on my back for an hour, masturbating, without dreams or fantasies, crying with the sense of vitality retreating from me. (Luke: "You have bad breath." "What does it smell like?" "It smells like shit."), my body seized with weakness at times during the day, like a little heart attack; he wanted me to be interested in his body, but I wasn't, any more than he was interested in mine - when he had his hands on it finally, it was there, hair growing longer and blacker around the nipple, stale smell from the vagina, little pimples on the skin, hair on the legs, fat and stretch marks on the thighs, it did not captivate him, and everything after we got out of bed was false. Fucking him was like throwing myself away, the still-potent person my refusal made him in his eyes; crying tonight I feel perhaps I've been wise to throw away that lovely support, which was loveliest on New Years Day, when he looked so fine in Stanley Park. He cried too a little. birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men. The birth of the real me might have ended like that of my unborn child. I may not become a saint, but I am very full and very rich. So says Anais, who has everyone in love with her, a big private income, a child who failed to become real, and a trip ahead of her. Premenstrual depression which is pre and post, and not going away, the caged feeling of being an ardent spirit without any freedom, it is January - last January, I was catatonic, the January before I was fine, with the Sufi farm - but? Perhaps not, I seem to remember desperation about my movie, before that, awful until I went away with John Rowley, and then saved, before that? the dismal winter after leaving Roy, before that Luke's birth and the betrayals it brought. I realized today that my gesture in having a child on my own was not even useful to the world, because there were lots of women making the same gesture. And - in order for it to be useful to the world I have to be happy in it, and I am not happy in it; I am not even managing on the simplest level of physical maintenance. Luke is actually neglected, and I am often brutal emotionally. Maggie is thriving since I told her she must leave: I am even more reduced, and there's a dependent child in me who wants to hang about listening to her talk. I watch it in surprise. Is Luke already patronizing me? No sooner had we got out of bed than Paul was withdrawing his most extreme affections. My life has to change. Maggie says I must learn to accept and adjust, Paul says I must learn to enter into my life and not withdraw from it because of my judgment. He does not say I must adjust; he says I must participate. "I like my network, it is the best there is" he said. I still have no network. Should I leave Vancouver, defeated, having never got to the snow, or the islands, or the interior? Is anything beginning here? My authority, my centre, in the Interart Co-op, is gone. Cathy feels sorry for me, or I feel she does. She does not participate with me. I no longer inhabit this house. The pictures, like Margaret's ballet picture, that I dislike, have made me withdraw my identity from it. I am no longer co-extensive with its size and complexity. I seem to be always protecting people from my scorn. Paul's shrink said he was carrying too much responsibility, like a heavy pack. I dreamed last night of a small square house, probably the childhood house, that I knew was going to burn; I took out a baby (Rudy or Luke) and many objects; and when the fire came - it was a huge flame that was let loose from the basement - I felt everything important had been saved. Thinking of the dream makes me like it - although I felt nothing like that in the dream, I'm glad to see the childhood house burnt by a huge flame broken out of the basement, so long as I have saved what I feel must be saved. - M seems twenty years older than she did in September. Saturday Paul and I had shadows falling between us like airplane propellers slashing down - being inside all day makes me rank. Luke and I were in the bathroom, I in the tub, he shitting with his pants down around his ankles, talking about what's in his head - he said he had a Lego instruction book in there, I asked for more pictures, he would cover his eyes with his hands and then emerge with a picture. "A sun, very, very high up" - stretching up - "and two girls holding each other's hands. They come from the town where the sun shows up." I found a picture of the doorway of a hotel like the Newton Rooms. He saw a "necklace shop."
Paul and I talking about finding the "island from which one could write." When he left Canada for San Francisco he felt he had left a waiting room. But had to come back.
- Paul is less fanatical, less greedy. I am less defended and less arrogant. Maggie has rebuilt her cool. When I hugged her this morning my solar plexus heated up so that it was still throwing out heat when I was hitchhiking on McGill. At the Art School, Paul was arriving for lunch at the same time as I. We heated our sexes by touching knees in the dining room. What is this heat and excitability for? When we lay down on his hotel bed yesterday and sank slowly into it, silent and trusting for a change, we got so deep into it that we couldn't satisfy ourselves, and kept a halo around our sexual parts, and said goodbye mirthfully. He looked beautifully young and true, laughed in his nest with his body gone boyish. - [written waiting in Paul's hotel corridor overlooking the harbour] Guide to the Gastown hotels - Cambie Hotel - interrogate, celebrate the way a pigeon glides, the way a gull glides, the sound of a radio in a corridor when the door opens. When the sun in the morning / peeps over the hill / and wakens the roses / on my window sill. Dave the old wheat farmer brings 2 Cadbury Rum and Butter chocolate bars, "Here Ellie, I've got something for you, you don't smoke, you don't drink." His chest whistles when he breathes. I say "Do you have asthma?" "Oh is it singing?" Writing for the sake of working. Making a book, which is a rectangular package. The world of writing. Écriture. The clover room, a meadow with flowers and butterflies. The mother of pearl room, translucent. Writers who nurse desires are allied with the health of the body. There are those who defy the body successfully, because their form of defiance is secretly allied to the body. A black freight boat with 6 masts clumps yellow like old grass. Last night I dreamed a canal or narrow stream on which passed a sailboat, wide sails like a fellukah, compact body like a 2-person galleon, rising at the back, carved and painted green. I was thrilled by its beauty and ran to follow it. The canal seemed to have become shallow as a rainslick on a road, and following this observation, a car actually passed on it, tires crackling. Yesterday morning I woke from dreaming a visit to a strange house where a young girl in the next room was playing the piano. I went and sang with her, and then saw, in the next room, the 'grown-ups,' among them my 'parents,' dancing to our music. It was a happy dream, and when I opened my eyes from it I saw a bloc of light on the north wall. The sun rises in the south-east these days - it shows up in the southeast. Pigeons reflected in red puddles on roofs of boxcars. Pigeons congregating like Greek men after church, in grey, black, brown, white and blue. A filtered brightness on the mountain slopes. Blue grey water dominates by its homogeneity, it's lit like opal, always boiling or running, in strips, always fastest near shore. Never are waves so high into the inlet. Mountains furred and whiskered, contours like animals', a blizzard moose, a hoar-frosted horse. Corrugated transport truck. What's so lovely about the diving birds, the shoals of birds. One morning the Powell Street bus was held up at the railway crossing, we had a display of pigeons on the Roger's Sugar terminal, orange sun, pigeons alighting, walking on sills, pushing off all together, circling to a new place, walking on other sills or the edge of the roof, leaving again and doing a circle in the free air in front of the big sunning wall with its windows regular in all directions Sweeping sounds. The thing about a water plane's engine noise when it takes off, is that it traces a line Mountains and clouds given the same nature, by their interaction: ie light areas, whiter or greyer areas, shifting all the time. Mountains cloudy in their billowing advances and retreats. Man in new red cotton plaid lumbershirt and green down vest has mop and bucket and is cleaning his room. Ducks just sitting on water look like they're rooted. Begin to apply cunning to writing. Al [Razutis] has a real smile. Corridor decorated with felt triangles from Kamloops, birds when they're going two ways at once. Cambie Hotel has its spine north-south, fire escape at north. "Somebody's welding over on the North Shore." Thin white-haired man whistles when he comes out his door - geography - dirty red engine puts up blue smoke - Hey good lookin' / what you got cookin' / how about cookin' / something up with me?
|