| dames rocket 2 part 4 - 1976 february - march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Abundant magic in this square mile, horses running as tiny figures on the curved bank, inner bank. The broad uneven asphalt shining with puddles, sheets of it holding cumulous and blue, the aluminum walkway testifying to light's direction by its clear bands of seven shades of silver, the whole spectrum of silver. Scents rising with water, volatile grass willow poplar and whatelse is this and in my talk of fairies I think to write the Tato stories and the queen stories, and then the hitchhiking stories, they have to be stories both Andy and Tony could read, and I have to learn from Isak Dinesen in them and then I have to publish them, also Colette in her sense of things sending up explosions of color. This is a story from five summers ago. I'm in Paris, walking toward the Porte de Lyon. There is road work and a diversion, and I am looking about me uncertain of whether it will be possible to stop drivers who are already confused and harassed by the narrow push of traffic behind them. Looking about I catch the eye of a truck driver sailing past in a blunt-fronted truck cab high above me. He's hauling two trailers, what because I'd been living in England I was calling, pleased to call, an articulated lorry. He braked onto the shoulder (verge) and when I didn't believe he had stopped for me, leaned and waved me forward from the nearside window. I stumbled forward suspicious, usually when I am offered rides before I ask for them there is going to be a little trouble. "Quel direction?" "Je vais a Avignon." "Ah, vous avez de la chance." I am packed in by this time, my bag is on the narrow bed behind the seats, he has pulled into the roadway and we pass the suburbs and the monolithic housing developments in silence. Warm August day, sunlight on the grass, the Route du Sud crowded with caravans and family cars. We are riding towering over them, the smooth rolling gravity of tons. I have learned a watchful reserve with men in cars; I'll wait to see what's on his mind before I relax. When we are well into the farmland wide machine-tilled wide-horizoned farmland he says "Vous m'excusez si je ne parle pas, je n'aime pas parler quand je conduis et quand je roule." "Oh, c'est parfait, moi j'aime bien le silence." Our exchange gives me a chance to look at him, and his bluntness reassures me. He's a very tanned man of about fifty driving bare-chested in baggy shorts and sandals, he's in good shape, stringy and hard with powerful arms. He hasn't smiled and neither have I. Now I relax in my corner, on my finely sprung high seat. I lean my own tanned arm out my window. The sun moves from left to right across the cab. We are really rolling the sounds and rhythms of the heavy machine boom like ground bass through the open windows and the landscape unrolls flashing at the grass verge, and slowing at each backward edge: near fields, poplar windbreak, far fields, horizon nearly still, so we could imagine ourselves on a track centred on a point somewhere past the tower of white cumulous in the far west. An arc intersecting with the sun's arc. Near midday he turns onto a sideroad and we begin to move toward the southeast, he says something in his southern accent that I don't understand, but his self possession is such that I trust him. This road is bumpy and I brace myself with a knee on the dashboard and both arms around my waist. We get a bad shaking. I just hang on. He's driving fast and apparently empty. At midday he brakes abruptly and pulls into the forecourt of a routier where five or six trucks have already stopped. "On va manger un peu." He jumps down and pulls on a shirt. I'm glad the shaking has stopped, and it's likely he's going to pay. He nods to the drivers sitting together at two tables, but finds us two chairs on the opposite side of the room. We both sit with our backs to the wall, we eat, the classical routier meal, with two carafes of red, that always makes me euphoric. We begin to talk, exchange our provenances, in the dim room. Bifteck, green salad, crudités, frites. The meal warms us both, and at a certain point I am able to tell him, what in my lonely days in Paris I have had to keep to myself: "Vous savez, je suis enceinte de cinq mois. A Paris aux magazins je regarde et je dis, 'Qu'est-ce que vous avez pour les nouveaux-nés?'" When I tell him it is as if I've exploded, it is such a pleasure to say "Quand je ... et ça me donne un tel plaisir que ..." Now he smiles. "Ah, vous auriez du me dire, j'aurai pris une route moins mauvaise." Now he tells me he is a grandfather. When we return to the truck we are old comrades. - Argument with M about my feelings, which change. She's saying you wanted me yesterday why don't you want me today. I'm saying, that's how it is, I was turned on. She's saying I always care about you. I'm saying, If you do you're lying. She invokes Buddhism and eternity. I invoke reification, "Any Buddhist book will tell you eternity has nothing to do with like and dislike" and I preach about the self. She says the self is a vehicle. I say no no no the self is a place on the water where everything flows and flows through, or a little patch of sky, the self is cloudy, or else it's a mirror moving about through the world. It's just a location. She's silent as if I've clobbered her. I say I'm always having this argument with people. Once there was a man who blackened my eye because of it. She gets up to have a bath. It's safer to be upstairs, like having a sentinel or a drawbridge. - A man across the room stares. He is suave, heavy, goodlooking, late thirties. He looks used to power over young sculpture students. I hate him. At the same time I'm flattered; maybe he is an Artist. I would like to wound him. I try to ignore him. I would like to know him, maybe he is someone. I pointedly look away when his gaze brings my head round involuntarily. But his gaze is making my gestures false, as I take pork to my mouth on a fork, as I load the fork, as I drink coffee, as I look around the room for Paul. This has happened many times. The look is attempting to turn me into prey. When I resolve to outstare him I cannot, because I'm not certain of his class. If he were more obviously contemptible I could do it easily. - Time to have some ca-reers: writing, film-making, and photography. Time to not give any of them up. I'm imagining a filing system. Pink basket from Africa. Not reading: trying to not read labels, photo captions, names of the photographer. How has my eye learned to spend its time compulsively munching up names of things. I'm old enough to abstain. Okay. That's sentiment. What's real - needing a technique to divert the eye - what's worth seeing - what, for instance, has not been seen while I am reading names - there's the allied eye-habit, supplying the name in mind - both are provincialisms of consciousness. It is coffee-consciousness too, nervy sharpness. Classical Joint - painted black, a stained yellow lampshade on a fluted stand, has a wonderful orange light, a pointed oval. The shop with Afghani clothes - want to dress like an ethnographic museum. - Goddamn Maggie playing conversation because she wants to be near me, asks irrelevant questions without a context, and I have to be rough and say I don't want to talk right now about how I feel about protests - also she is stoned and her words are coming out heavily with spaces between like a row of rocks. Her arms over her chest defending herself from my rejection. I hate being put in the position again of the cruel sister. Maybe I should say No, I've been protecting you, it is not that I am so arbitrary, it is that your nature, your obtuseness, your niceness, your ingenuousness, are not what I need, and they irritate me, and they utterly stop me loving you, and I wish you hadn't disappointed me. Ie clear rejection. - The rainy day I went to Victoria, missed the demonstration, walked round the museum, came home, got Luke at 10 pm from Nigel's house. Aki, White Eagle, Uti, and Jim Bridges. Wain and Paul. The blue van with a wooden rear door that has a heart on it covered with fibreglass. Young Japanese girl married to Jim, 2 children and a 4-month fetus, schoolgirl face and strong black hair down past her waist, a Japanese wrap around her. This morning's dreams of going to the expanded Sufi farm, red morning glories along a path that had a water pond on the other side, a childhood friend getting up to sing and doing it with raucous uncharacteristic confidence, while I watched the prim way she held her feet; "our cow men" coming out of the woods, 20 of them; I was looking around for Elias. The detail of these dreams. Paul being odd and artificial on the ferry - I called him on it by saying "Do you have a secret? You're more in your persona than you usually are with me." He felt better later and liked me because I'd stopped him. - Isak Dinesen: We fish are upheld and supported on all sides. We lean confidently and harmoniously upon our element. We move in all dimensions and whatever course we take, the mighty waters out of reverence for our virtue change shape accordingly. - Black Sunday. Luke in wild spirits, at the Western Front he runs in wild circles around the two spots thrown down on the clear area of carpet. Paul ugly with skin peeling but I wasn't minding, the sun came out while we were on the railway tracks, and across; back faces of warehouses, boxcars, an odd boat with a paddle wheel on either side, plus tall masts, plus a brown canvas tent on deck, plus a blue plastic shield taken from a telephone booth, around the wheel. Then a squash-yellow or cheese-yellow seaplane taxied in and a thin woman in a Mexican blouse, pale blue eyes she had, a lovely face creased at the eyes and mouth, worn pretty, followed by a tall bearded man in cowboy hat and boots, gruff, crazy? talking like a stoned Mexican, kissed my hand when she said "This is the welcoming committee." They had come, she said, from an island whose name we had never heard before. We asked her to repeat it, she did, but we did not remember it. They walked into town, they were ambassadors from another sort of place, I ate them up with my eyes. Luke ate up the seaplane. Paul and I have fallen away from one another into some unreality. We could not feel any real attachment to each other the last few times we met; he's indifferent, and I suppose has begun to criticize now my own indifference is amplified, coherent indifference. [Later] No I'm sure it's the fight with his shrink. He was in a tizzy about Luke's wriggles and plummets and little noises during the holographic demonstration. We had expensive untasty pancakes in a place I resented. We took buses over the Second Narrows and saw lavender behind the mountains, pink clouds to the south. Stephanie Judy and Judith Berlin and Ann Bishop: I don't have access to them and grimace at them when I meet them. Maggie is original, I should try just to study what's there. Be my project, research this month. Want to go back to the Mountain Highway Hotel. - I've been giving away my resources
I was right about Paul's secret, and his criticism - it was from the time we went on the ferry and I stayed too long at the pipe - he felt it was 'aesthetic' and defensive, a drawn-back, chin-retracted aestheticism that he despised me for - he'd been using Wain as a counterweight to me - when he told me this he leapt to his knees in a silly way and said "Tell me it doesn't matter that I felt that" and I scowled and said he was trying to take back information I needed. I was trying to find out why the people who interest me are not attracted to me - wondered if it is located in the voice, like the prissiness of Steve, or the girl on the Jane Austen program who sounded like M. A sore contemplation of my PR and what could be wrong with it - "unnatural" said Paul, and at the opposite end of the spectrum completely natural. It's true there's little charm or humour in me. And always someone lurking to spoil the ease of people - a sourness. Voice sounds like it 'discriminates.' He said it prissily. Should maybe decide on some cheap tricks - more flamboyance, not less. Help! Sarah - The actual puzzles - Mae - Stephanie - Judith - The blue pages - talk - way I shape my mouth - they are a little academic - hear myself pompous with most people - Paul said in San Francisco the thing is, if you have it you flaunt it; here, if you have it you don't flaunt it but hide it and work quietly at home at night, because here it scares people. The mode - "Maybe you speak too seriously about film-making, writing, and such, you're too intense about them." Here's the odd thing: I'm too English now. In England, too 'American.' More willing to become English than American. - Another dream of shouting at Father (2 in a month). The scene last night - Maggie crowding me into a corner till I bit her, she backed off at last and I cried "Why do you force it!" and she got up and stalked downstairs, and I lay back again with my heart banging - was afraid and got out the jackknife. Realized a few things, after Kathy Ross's visit - that M is thriving on the rejection she gets from me, that she is setting up the house to suit her in some way - and that her way of touching me when she knows instantly I don't want her, is violence that I'd not put up with in a man. I was surprised how her hands were like wire coming after me; I was really frightened and it pleased me that I'd bitten her, it seemed a quick accurate reflex. Cold wire traps. Reclaiming the house. - I could write the story of Luke's birth - a lives of girls and women story. A very large number of women have their birth stories to tell, but I can hardly remember reading one, except in various guides to natural childbirth, case histories and such. There was Martha Quest's delivery - quote. Is that all? When I asked my mother about my own birth she said she couldn't remember much. When I asked Roy's mother about his birth, she said she couldn't remember anything. When I asked my grandmother about my mother's birth, she laughed and said "Ach, du fragst mir alles" and talked about something else. First generation reliable birth control. Changed lovers - threw away my pills. I was shy with this little person. The story of me'n Roy - photo of belly and pants The story of visiting G'ma - photo at the table - Paul on this Sunday, and calling me back: learning to be his old man - I meant to say own. Says Annie Dillard - "That dingbat?" says George - is living on a nearby island. [later: Lummi] Créd's lament, 8th or 9th century. Liadan a professional poet in early Ireland. Don't know how early. Extreme love for a man from another country who reached above his contemporaries has taken my complexion - there is little color left; it does not let me sleep. Except for praise of the King of Heaven, his speech was sweeter than all songs; a splendid lover without a boasting word, a soft-skinned slender bedmate. When I was a child I was shy; I did not go on the evil trysts of passion; since I reached the instability of age my wantonness has begun to deceive me. I have every good with Guaire, the King of cold Aidne, but my mind seeks to go away from my tribes into the country of Irluachair. I said it was the first time I'd read a man referred to in that way in a poem. He said it was for him too - Yeats "Tragedy must be a joy to the man that dies." Owing to historical circumstances the Jews for close on 2000 years have been townsmen. Reading The backward look. Frank O'Connor 1967 The backward look: a survey of Irish literature Macmillan - Monday - such as there never was or will be: dalliance in the morning, Maggie at work and Luke gone to school, waiting for the post, letter from Mafalda, the film lab for optical print, lunch at the art school, eating with Diana, Terry and Lynn, arguing with Diana about feminist segregation (she doesn't want to be associated with it), messing up the optical print because of not being able to find the right parts of it, my dismay about the poor dirty scratched old print - wound, rewound so many times - cold rain pouring down - half an hour to drop in at Paul's hotel - his granary-icons [photos of the grain elevators at Second Narrows] - me pious on the dresser - other photographs - the Only [café] for soup for Paul, rain dripping off my hair down my neck, unpleasantly - the velvet shirt today, red necklace, jeans - Save On to buy food for Luke's supper - red Mac apples, small oranges, carrots, a cucumber, 3 bananas - Luke's daycare - Sarah says she's coming home and I call Sylvia and arrange it - wet, it's my day to clean [the daycare], Leslie makes me coffee, Sara, Ali, Sarah and Luke shriek and tumble, I slowly vacuum, Leslie goes home. Sarah and Luke sit on the table absorbed in their boat captain story, we go home, wet our hair, Luke his shirt, Sarah her long trousers. My head is soaked. I'm carrying the red bag with its broken strap, groceries, film equipment, in my arms against my stomach. Make supper. Luke shows off his cat. Sarah is shy and seems too well-mannered, she is following the rules of her own household. Luke takes off his shirt and trousers and shows off his penis. I cook, trying to make sure Sarah feels at home. She won't eat her cucumbers and grated carrot until the rice is ready and we sit down properly. She puts soy sauce on her rice and mixes it up responsibly. She says "May I please be excused" and takes her plate to the sink. Lovely Sylvia runs a German household even without patriarch? Maggie comes in with her head soaked and I bring her a towel and hang up her coat. Her wet head seems small and her glasses large, covered with water drops. I'm happy to see her, give her rice, she says "Do you know why you're so happy today?" I feel like teasing her. Sylvia comes - M is in the bath with candles, incense and a joint - and has to be shown the upstairs again - I try to show her my rug and the collages but she is distracted and just tries to rush Sarah out - Luke cries goodbye from the door and window. I take him upstairs and rush him through o universe and get into the tub and read right through the February Ms. [Spero collage] - Think of writing - question of who for - somewhere today someone in a review says it's best if the reader feels herself personally addressed at her most real private level - who do you write to, for that. Do you imagine an other who is yourself. Outside sound of running water. Or a dearest him, or an imaginary Miriam? - The private voice. The intoxicated child-keeper. The sophisticated child, peasant - in Ms, powerful writing by a very young woman called Deborah Homsher makes me feel so amateur. The struggle I always have, with the culture that tries to get me to speak it. (Thought of it, Glenda Jackson can speak her own background and be intelligent and formed, in what she does in her work.) Trying to speak honestly these days, felt brash with Leah, pushy with Diana, good with Maggie, neurotic with Paul. - My fourteen year old enthralled with sex - living in the hospital with a community of adults around me, obviously aware of my heat, the nurses not sure of their responsibility, Doreen lonely, and hungry on her own account, watching my life which was entirely sex. My whole childhood was enthralled by sex - did any of those people read my journal? Now that thrall isn't there, I almost don't know what to think about - but how I trivialized it too. What would have happened if I'd had a contraceptive and been able to fuck Douglas Odland with some honesty, instead of the silly evasion I practiced and felt I had to maintain. Yet, grown up, lying with Paul Kinsella in his hotel bed, something wrong, waiting for the right fluctuation to join us, and it not coming, and saying "Paul, I'm way behind you" and when he touched my breast roughly, nothing penetrating the skin, experimentally trying to fuck him quickly for his pleasure, which he had entirely on his own. Nothing passed my skin at all. We wanted to have the last time over again, when we both gave ourselves as deep as we could, but I found myself unable to give, we tried in irony sadness or humor to say our truths, but there was always more uneasiness. Paul in his hotel room listening to old men hack, finding them bloody at the door; it scares him and he thinks of suicide. Of wife and family and house, a woman who would really love him. Or of a job. Described his movements - "There's a trio now, a sort of triangle - no, let me finish." I'm telling him "No, we can't retreat, we have to go forward - we don't have any choice, we have the fantasy, but we can't really do it." He says I really think of myself as an outsider, but he feels he became one because of coming to Canada when he did, and he feels he could integrate now, the shock has gone. Felt he meant to defect and leave me without company in my rebellion. Talking to M about how sometimes the only thing you can do is rebel: "Not that, and not that, and not that, and not that -." Taking so long because of having so far to come. Dillard would say we're left to god, to be witnesses, it is our nature, when we've done our mating, to wait and pray, watch and pray. The subject of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is Annie Dillard, a person invented we want to love, we want to be. A large soul without triviality, but not pious, not full of nonsense - "flailing my arms and hollering 'Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs!'" - Enlarge my soul, o universe. Dillard and the ichthyologist She is a sensationalist, she dares everything, the most extravagant feeling, because she salts it with wild and bad and throw-away contemporary smart journalism - no one can accuse A Dillard of monomanic melodrama. "I can't see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, 'til it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo." Dizzy, dazed, reeling, transfixed, swaying, appalled, dazzled, witless, startled, blinding, hallooing. I propose to keep what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind." So I think about the valley. It is my leisure, as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary - the conditions of time - in which the payoffs which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as to anyone else. I stake the time I'm grateful to have, the energies I'm glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans. or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing. Territory, look around, what's here? - Eulogy on fish - why now! Film-maker making a film on fish - she uses fish to reach around in all directions - university. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek's bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deeper stars at the crown of an infinite cone. If I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It's not that I'm observant, it's just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I'll never know what's happening. Like a blind man at a ball game, I need a radio. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. Sainthood - passion - travel - creatures - sight - spiritual genius - It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit until you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. But I live for it, the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. - Marianne Moore - "What of chastity? It confers a particular strength. Until recently, I took it for granted as a universally regarded asset, like avoiding 'all drugs'." Buber "The free man believes in destiny, and that it has need of him." Technical means - off-rhymes, rhythms that accent a word into another meaning - "Leaving you, I was sundered like the sea."
Marianne Moore looks like Carmichael. - Dreamed myself into another whole life, there was a man and a history of other men - this one had dark brown eyes and shaggy hair and a moustache - I had a phlegmatic pregnancy, with its own history, and gave birth without excitement to a phlegmatic boy - he was large, plump, and cheerful - I amused myself putting him into the bath face down to watch him struggle to get his head up. As I saw how gallant and stoical and unirritable he was I began to love him a little. There was some sense of a community life I was part of, young students, intelligent and easy, not specialized out like the Slade students - going out in the morning, meeting them. "Ellie this is what I'm learning, this is what my self is trying to learn." "What?" "Eating my porridge whether it's hot or cold." Luke pale in a longsleeved blue tee-shirt, eating chocolate porridge out of a tin plate, water in the aluminum measuring cup, a little china dish beside his bowl - avocado plant in the pink oil tin, Tiger Brand. - Noticed in Updike too, how he's leaving out commas as much as possible. Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings Traherne was born in 1637, Lugwardine and Hereford, Oxford, "very affable and pleasant in his conversation," was a clergyman all his life. encouragement to travel Spelling and punctuation are "eccentric." The Affirmative Way, which pursues perfection through delight in the created world, lack of emphasis on sin.
bereave it of use [sense] Difficult rhythms, sense of paradise like CS Lewis. Paradise sensual. In Dumbnesse he sings the time before he could speak or be infected by the speech of others, he had only one Work:
But Evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue And let mine Enemies hoop, Cry, roar, Cal My Essense was Capacitie He repeats the same things, as if to remember them - as if he cannot now write individual praises to individual things, only praise of his former capacity. O Wondrous Self! O Sphere of Light Image of a lantern:
With Secret Rooms in Times and Ages more - Friday. Woke in M's bed [M was away] with worries about my movie and our eviction - dark, with her ugly curtains up - happy to see the blue light outside, powdery. Heard Luke's door open but he didn't come down. Got up, turned on the heater, Luke's voice came down "Good morning Ellie." I went up and didn't find him in his bed, but slotted in with Paul under the red and green washed sleeping bag, two naked boys on the pillow like paper dolls in an envelope. I got in too. Paul stoked my knee. We went to breakfast, which I made while Luke dressed and Paul washed. There was some sun, we had buttered toast and tea, Luke and Paul had porridge. Paul took Luke to school because he had promised, Luke looked extremely nice in his red teeshirt and blue dungarees. Paul came back and sat across the table in his black shirt and trousers, with the shirt buttons open, and we had the blue plates, the bare wood of the table, and the avocado in its Tiger Brand pink olive oil tin, between us. I read some Traherne - the First Centuries passage about the Gentleman's house, and we marveled together. I was happy at how Paul listened, as he always does listen wonderfully. Then I was assembled to go out to work and errands, and Paul was offended that I wasn't lingering with him, and I felt his sadness all morning anyway; he hurried off because I hadn't slept with him, I guess. But I walked to the Bank of BC corner and took a bus and marveled at the human beings on it, and got my check and went to VCC and had lunch - Ray from yesterday sat with me and talked about lithographs and etchings - Lynn was sitting pretty on the other side. Derrick let me into the cutting room. Looked at the beginning of the film, found it so dirty I was in despair of cleaning it, worried about destroying it with the chemical cleaner. I was going to pack it up defeated and take it to the lab dirty, when the slight young-looking boy called Gordon [Kidd] appeared to ask how it was going. I told him I had run out of courage, he thudded my shoulder and said "Don't run out of courage!" and seemed to like staying and talking. So I asked him about picking the lights and he helped me with tail leader - and he showed me how to clean it - and invited me to his studio - and said he had a rowboat - and I was encouraged. We invented a way to set a brake on the rewinds with a coat sleeve. He recommended scratch removing. All the difficulties became little manageable tasks. We both in the end overplayed our roles a little, I was too grateful and he went embarrassed smarmy and a little pious, wanted to patronize me a little, but when I'd stared at his childish profile as he expertly touched all the little bits - tape, matte knife, rewinds, end of film, gloves - that I am so shy of, I felt a real loving gratitude to his willingness. Cleaned by myself - except for a few pinholes and long scratches it was working - 'til 5 o'clock, had to stop, rush home on a Renfrew bus to get to the bank before fetching Luke; then buying yogourt fruit milk olives orange juice. Got home to find M eating chicken livers cottage cheese and sweet potatoes. M cross and tired because of her job. Bath, Luke was there too, washed him and his hair in my rinse water (bathwater too hot and deep for him), read maimed first chapter of Pippi, discussed rent coolly with M, who went to bed at 9 while I read Traherne with the cat. - This is for history. - Paul white and sad, could tell the minute he came to the door, in his old raincoat, stalwart back, only Paul Kinsella, my existence hurts him because he doesn't get what he wants from me. Maggie the same. My momentary tendernesses gathering their accretion of pain and refusal. Luke, when I am thinking of movies, trying to crawl into my lap and I am sharp, wails, mouth wide open and square. Brilliant day. The harbour had a red crane redder for the light, with the blue mountains turning violet behind it. A wind made the water break into scales that became wonderful after we'd been next to them a while. Students at the art school are friendly. - Accusation. You come, talking in a pious voice, your face swollen like a fruit, telling me you love me - then, when I've fucked you as coldly as I know how, in contemptuous lust that makes no connection with you at all, and gone to sleep without acknowledging your presence - you wake up restored, cheerful, nonchalant, having got what you wanted. I am poisoned and you have no idea why. Was that goodbye? I'll hold onto my wrath because I want to use it against you. "You used to be close to me and now I don't know where you are." - Luke's cheerfulness in the morning, feebleness at night. Leah making me feel good on the phone. O Baroness! I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place. Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards a happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God's idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny. love the pride of your fellow-partisans and allow them no self-pity. I love her on the way through Out of Africa, in the first section she is the perfect baroness, the queen, the enchanted life, then in the anecdotal section From an immigrant's notebook she seems to be straining, and she's diminished by it, and then in the farewell to the farm, where she stages the old chief's death, then Denys Finch-Hatton's, she confesses a little - oh, she's a narrator! Whenever I was ill in Africa, or much worried, I suffered from a special kind of compulsive idea. It seemed to me then that all my surroundings were in danger or distress, and that in the midst of this disaster I myself was somehow on the wrong side and therefore was regarded with distrust and fear by everybody. Isak Dinesen 1937 Out of Africa Putnam - Harding: The anima woman must find her suprapersonal value, not through an intellectually accepted idea, but through a deeper experience of her own nature which leads her into relation to woman's spirituality, the feminine principle itself. Jung has used the old Greek concept of Eros or relatedness to express this feminine principle, in contrast to the Logos which is the masculine principle dealing with factual knowledge and wisdom. Learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. If thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thyself, one and many, just as the atom, thus finding from thyself a way out of thyself. - Gnostics M. Esther Harding 1933 The way of all women CG Jung Foundation Harding is saying that, for a woman to grow she has to feed her double need. "Let us live strongly, devotedly whatever comes, and afterwards, let us analyze it." Women need to be delivered first from the dominion of nature, and then from the dominion of the ego. Can be done through a worked-out relationship in which "for the sake of an inner relation to the spring of life, or for the sake of gaining consciousness and reality in a relationship, a woman may indeed be content to accept pain. She may even be willing to go voluntarily to meet pain and perhaps to inflict it on a loved one, if, by taking the painful course, truth may be served."
H says there are two ways - one is falling in love, the other is accepting a suprapersona value. Animus - he is her soul mate, her other half, the invisible companion who accompanies her though life. Aspect of the siren who lures away from the real world, the divine lover. Transference - emotional involvement resulting from a projection. She connects animus and ghostly lover with the untested idealities, unwritten novels - "Whenever it seems easier to enjoy an idea or an interpretation alone, one should suspect that it is the work of the Ghostly Lover. Reality is a great test of value." Prince Charming - projection on living person - vision of inner values = "the constellation of the animus." At the very moment when the animus values are glimpsed, energy is always released. Have to reach out and try to keep it. One of the effects of lifting the spell of the ghostly lover is stopping the universal criticism of people you meet - emotional life in contacts that were sterile. When the libido streams out to an external object and is checked, it tends to take the person inside with it. C/f after I didn't love M any more. When she is identified with the animus, she is possessed by opinions and rationalizations and so-called principles which do not represent true wisdom at all. These are the works of the Ghostly Lover. True wisdom can be known only through the spiritual, or redeemed, animus who is a mediator between conscious and unconscious. He brings the values of the creative sources of the unconscious within reach of that human being who has had the courage and the strength to overcome the Ghostly Lover. - Is the last part rhetoric? Don't know what it means. I've been hanging onto the idea of animus per se, and jump on the thought of a redeemed animus - maybe that's Miriam Xios. Harding does assume "feminine and biological needs" that must be kept in consciousness. She says it is not possible for men to value women on any basis other than "her feeling quality." Jung. Masculinity "knowing what one wants and doing what is necessary to achieve it." Animus women are in danger of doing everything for power and prestige. Their female feelings are still there, and very dangerous to their mode. She's living away from her emotional center of gravity, to be really creative she has to experience deeply "her own feminine nature" - ie Dillard, West, Duras. But the man who tries to become a 'great lover' or to establish himself in the world of men through his feelings, will be hopelessly lost. Withdrawn from the world and hidden himself in a lowly position. He tries to make a new life based entirely on feeling values, but he is unable to establish any relation to the woman other than a sexual one, for he cannot uphold the masculine end of the relationship. Creation - women have trouble revealing themselves. involves a sacrifice of her ego for a good reason. A woman's revealing of herself is a matter of feeling rapport; a pose of unmodesty thus involves repression of deep feelings and sexuality. Jung - Eros, psychic relatedness; Logos, objective interest She is saying friendship between women is the locus of development of feminine values, Eros values, out of competition, differentiated from anima role values - during historical periods when men's relations to each other were made much of there was a "great increase in strength and significance of manly virtues and a corresponding decrease in the purely physical involvement of men in instinctual satisfaction with women." By their very nature women need above all things to keep the feeling atmosphere clear. Work on relationship which bores or frightens most men makes a development of character in relation to Eros. Quarrels - "The intensity of interest is not in winning the argument, but in the mutual involvement which a quarrel permits." They [lesbians] will probably find that the physical attraction, as such, recedes in power and proves to have been nature's way of forcing them to a realization of the importance of the bit of life they are to experience through each other ... purpose of this kind of union is to strengthen the power of the feminine element in both women. When this is accomplished the natural polarity of the sexes begins to reassert itself. The difficulties of friendship - "Her isolation and loneliness force a woman to companionship, and that companionship in its turn, compels her to find what and who she really is. This dual movement toward differentiation and development in the psychological realm is apparently a life aim which functions regularly." She says that there is real danger in wearing a persona too often, that it will not come off any more. The sexuality of men is so closely linked with sexual needs and satisfactions that a long discipline is always required to gain release on that plane from the pleasure principle. She actually says that men expect intercourse to put things right, and she "knows deep down within her woman's nature that to have intercourse when the feeling between them is not right violates her, and in consenting to it she consents to an assault upon herself." - What they really remembered in him [Denys] was his absolute lack of self-consciousness, or self-interest, an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him I have only met in idiots. In a colony, these qualities are not generally held up for imitation, but after a man's death they may be, perhaps Here we marked out the place for the grave, by the compass, laying it East to West. When the boys began to work, I heard that there was an echo in the hills, it answered the strokes of the spades, like a little dog barking. She gave away her horses and dogs! There was a full moon in those days, it shone into the bare room and laid the pattern of the windows on the floor. - When the house is empty and she is leaving. chalked stripes running along their crooked limbs as if they were, in their stark truthfulness, emphasizing the stiff and brittle bones underneath the skin. The old Kikuyu women have had a hard life and they were wilder than the men, and, even more thoroughly than they, devoid of the faculty of admiration ... This strength and love of life in them, to me seemed not only highly respectable, but glorious and bewitching. After a moment she broke out weeping, tears streaming over her face, like a cow that makes water on the plain before you. [an old Kikuyu woman she met on a path] On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them. a very lonely figure, a heroic figure, who had bought his loneliness with everything he had. - And if they have come to believe that their conscience will not really approve anything they do, physical or spiritual, unless this secret little love which is fixed on the cloud of unknowing is the mainspring of their work spiritually, then it is a sign that they are being called to this work by God; otherwise not. How to choose contemplation - clear yourself of past sins. Romantic love is nature's way of overcoming the difficulties opposed to physical union; when this is accomplished the urgency recedes. Hostages to fate - having a child to give hostages to fate. What is a serious relation that demands for the soul itself work on the relationship H seems to feel "instinct and love" are resources of deep experience that can be repressed more dangerously through rational explanation. Find means to keep in very close touch with the principle of relatedness within herself and can constantly purify her own motives. Jung "All the most important problems of life are insoluble. They must be so, because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown." Work on relationship - must be v sincere and careful - no self-justifying to save face - no patronizing analysis of the other - no easy generalities. Loyally try to understand one's own unconsciousness. Difficulties often associated with one's own most intimate inferiority. Persona is useful, in fact vital, because one person's truth is not another's, but it must be conscious and flexible - for instance a business persona. If a woman wishes to test the validity of another's feeling, she must bring her own feeling into play with it but the feelings she brings must be her real feelings. Anyone who, with truth as his criterion, has delved at all into the unconscious, must have become convinced of the existence and power of evil. Ie there are real dualities. "Redemption of energy held in the unconscious by the image of" the father. - Shouting at M because, when we are talking about the concept of a feminist art support community, she doesn't understand what I am saying. I let out my frustration and she's admirable and shouts back and throws water on me and tells me how can I try to set up a women's art co-op if I'm too intolerant to share my knowledge. And she is right. I am too intolerant to want to teach, because I want to learn, I want thrilling exchanges with evolved peers - by which I can expand to my true largest own expansion. And why is Stephanie not interested in me? Nora Blanck? The new task here, to replace trying to escape from Paul, will be the co-op I guess - I'll have to work hard to keep hold of my dream-energy at the same time as being astute about what's available - remember Elias - that's one way, and Pat is another. If I have to embark on leadership it's important to be honest and not waffle like Joyce Siercy. -
Until love has quickened a soul, it is like an unfledged bird. Religion, is it a way to stay in love? - Meditation - providing a perspective, an outside. Jerry [Resnick] on the telephone - wants to see me in March - sounds like a business man - why am I writing this down? In the mushrooms rooms air and space, entertainment. Always the big screen self-curiously connected, as by convention, to a still body with occasional orgastic waves through the head, visions all interesting but leaving before they've stayed their welcome out, all with comment on the nature of life and consciousness, a happy perspective contemptuous of everyday mind which seems to be a shellacked papier-maché set where things are kept compulsively in existence even when not needed - the tree falling in an uninhabited forest our responsibility - in the mush rooms it was - not mushy, but flou like dry clear light diaphanous things - the dream world, but brought a little nearer to the outward body so I could come and go between them. Paul was there - I appeared too smiling, below, I thought shall I be this person? There seemed many other people I could be, I considered whether this smiling female person with a lot of hair was a soul worth inhabiting. The beauty of the mushrooms, and they're always philosophic with me, is that the show goes on as if I weren't looking at it, and yet I can look at it as much as I like, and think about it. A brownness. Do the mushrooms draw people? Jerry, and then Grandma, telephoning. Carmichael - is it something to do with my body only in as far as my body is worthy of my soul - With me it has always been thought that is repressed - pressures of unexpressed thought - I am learning to speak - the secret resources that write are also there for speech. A kind of ecstatic classicism - West, Dinesen, the Welsh woman. Energy politics - who should I give it to? You. Because I need you. She says that marriage is so serious a woman has to do everything she can to make it real, otherwise, if she leaves too soon, she will carry the necessity of taking it up where she left off, with another man. - Luke being about to leave, stirs up my biology to want another baby. Well, nothing easier! But before I do any such thing, I must
Maternity can be symbolic of the birth of a new self - to the mother. The spiritual child born of the experience of maternity is in the same way not the mother's personal ego reborn, but is non-personal, a new center for the psyche the Self. Necessary for spiritual well-being But is a journey she makes alone - I have learned householding is a pleasure if I balance it with my own real work - all the while with Luke I'm feeling all this has to happen once more to be really felt. "A mother needs to keep herself psychologically clean" because of resentment - "for the woman who is aware of the psychical realm, maternity imposes a discipline which reaches below the surface and strikes directly at her most hidden, most secret selfishness and egotisms." When values are overthrown in a single generation they sink into the unconscious, ie it is not an individual achievement but rather a collective one, and not assimilated. "Many who started out so gallantly were not equipped to be pioneers." I pity the poor immigrant Stealing the right to be adult - separate from the group, individual. This is the necessary crime. Individuation is always a theft from the group, cannot be stolen with the acquiescence of the gods or community. Only by repressing and disregarding her emotions can she accept the embrace of a man who does not profoundly stir her. In the transition from the biological to the psychological sphere there is, as always, a pitfall of the ego, of personal pleasure and satisfaction ... [sex instinct] must find for itself another no less compelling reality capable of imposing the limits and barriers which alone make possible a further step in development. [undated letter to my mom] Hello M, this is Maggie's new pen, no improvement on the old one - it is Sunday afternoon, dark, wet, and cold, but we are in the front room with a big fire, drying our jean-bottoms; Luke is reading comics on the floor, I have a cup of coffee and Maggie with her granny glasses on is darning a sock. What a family - where's Porpoise Gooseberry? All we need is him to complete the tableau. Luke's just gone to find him. Our house is breaking up at the end of February. The landlady wants to move back in herself. Luke's going to England for 45 days on an excursion flight. I am going to live homeless, on the road, for the whole time, and not pay rent anywhere and not lift a broom or a plate and be my own woman in a new goosedown sleeping bag. There is a little lump of money coming in and I'm going SOUTH on it, oh wheeee. Our Women's Inter-art Co-op may have a studio by the first of March, I'll send you that address if we do. Yesterday was Mennonite Day - I made bread while reading Peace shall destroy many - it was like reading anthropology, details of a life in a vanished society - his dialogue is very false, but I guess it is hard to write in English what was actually said in Plautdietsch - I wish he had written it in Plautdietsch, or made a version for the initiated, with real conversations in it. - Hitchhiking downtown Monday, I had a lift from a florid but not stupid man who told me he was a whiskey salesman. We were talking about drinking and I told him I'd never acquired a taste for it, and then I told him I'd had religious parents and so on. What kind of religious, he wanted to know. "I guess you've probably heard of Mennonites?" I asked him. "Don't tell me you're a Mennonite too!" he said; he was from Elmira. I told him he was the first Mennonite whiskey salesman I'd met. It's Wednesday now, Luke went to England yesterday. He had on new shoes sprayed silver like mine, his blue overalls and a red teeshirt; his eyes shone and his cheeks were very pink, and he had Maggie's goodbye present, toy binoculars, hanging round his neck the whole time. My friend Leah, and her two children, took us to the airport, and we commandeered three tables in the lounge, where we sat spilling orange juice and sharing hot dogs in a farewell feast. Luke looked so beautiful, he was transfigured with excitement, and so too was his friend Tara, Leah's girl. They swooped through the airport terminal like comets, and then when it was time for Luke to be taken on board, Tara and I took him to the departure gate. There was a young woman who took his bag, I said 'Bye Luke. 'Bye, he said. Give me a kiss I said, and he did, very warmly, but then he was gone, looking straight ahead, intent and thrilled in the way I recognize so well, not a backward look - The observation area was closed off so we had to pick up the remaining kids and haul them outside, way round to the edge of the field where a strong cold wind almost knocked us over. Every plane that took off, we craned to see - but it was a while before Luke's red and white Air Canada jet lept into the sky. We all waved and screamed Goodbye Luke! But the airplane was a mile up by that time. On the way home I wrote a poem:
During the next while you can write to me c/o Women's Interart Co-op, Basement, 163 W.Pender. It's our new co-op studio. Good days and happy studying to you. I'm visiting Clearbrook on Sunday. Love. Have you heard more from Paul? Is he alright? [back to journal] Thoughts of Carmichael - Luke - new baby - money - Co-op - airport - Leah and Maggie - feelings of distance from the normal race - Luke in the week before he left - I love him for his dignity, logic, inner truthfulness, and outer, morning cheerfulness, strength of character - oh and his high joy at the airport racing around with Tara his twin comet - Mr and Mrs Goodstock for sure, I took their picture that way - Luke, loving too, but the truth of him is a great solidness - how he was glad to see Paul, always leaping at him with a happy howl when he saw him. - Wrote to Don about music - music not being like eros, but vice versa; music being some sort of primary capacity of the body to understand a secret language that encodes some huge things we need to remember. My movie reaching music just at the passage where the breaking tiles and the sound of the jet seem to be growing on either side of the body and pulling it like a tide with a moon on either side, generating a power. [Take Amtrack south to visit Jerry Resnick in Santa Monica. We drive to San Felipe in the Baja for the weekend. Am in LA very sick with the flu' for a week. Hitchhike back to Vancouver. Photos: the beach at San Felipe, copal tree like a woman washing her hair, copal knees.] He was young, dim, and going home to his eighteen year old wife and their two children. Off and on for six hours he had been telling me they were happy, and loved each other and the babies. She'd been angry he hadn't taken her with him to Monterray, and to make peace with her (she'd thrown a bottle after him when he left) he was bringing her a slow-cooker like she'd wanted ever since she saw it on television, the best brand. At a café in one of the redwood forests, he bought her another present, one-fifty out of his last ten dollars, a redwood pot with a seed planted in it that in three months would spring up as a little tree. When the Oregon border was posted he blew it a kiss. He had a little head and no flesh on him, hair cut close to his skull, and a look so weedy, childish, inconsequential and malnourished, that his macho confidence ("I bring in the money around there, and that makes me the head of the household. There was a while it seemed like she wanted to be the boss, but I set her right") (she and the children were on welfare, and he was on unemployment) seemed a bizarre triumph I could hardly resent. He was twenty three, I am thirty one; but he patronized me. It was his car, and it was clear to him that I was there to listen to his remarkably self-absorbed banalities. I was there to provide him with a sense of himself. I complied. Twice during the trip he stopped to buy a Coke, and poured whiskey into it looking around paranoically. Said he was an alcoholic, and it steadied him. Otherwise he'd have to take the nerve pills. Did it scare me? he asked. I said I hoped he knew what he was doing. His driving was fine, he drank slowly and made the Coke last an hour, held between his knees while he drove. At Coos Bay, where he turned off, he let me out somewhere halfway through the town. Boats and a railway track in the dark on the right. I walk out of town to the bridge he told me about. Friday night. They're partying in Coos Bay. I start walking between the tracks and a man hails me. Offers me a ride out of town. "I don't like to think of a chick sleeping out there in the bush," he said, and thought and thought about where I could stay. "You could come back to my house, but my old lady wouldn't like it, she wouldn't say anything, but she wouldn't like it." Let me off on a corner where he turned up the road. Dark, although there was a red flasher to mark the junction. On the side of 101 opposite the road he'd turned down, was a dirt road. A few lights around. Maybe a barn? A wooden bridge underfoot, and suddenly a hole I almost stumbled into. Good, I thought, it's best if cars can't make it up this way. Picked my way past the holes, and found a lot of water on the road just beyond it. Good, barriers on both sides, and a little square room in the bushes. Spread my coat, untied my sleeping bag, took off my shoes and put them into the pack, set my shoulder bag for a pillow, and got into bed. Ah, lovely bed, lovely horizontal. Cold spots underneath. Rearrange, push the lumpy camera in my pillow over to the side, put a sleeve under the kidneys, snuggle the pack up against my side to cover a thin place in the down. Listen. Cars, twenty feet away, one a minute. A roar that came on little by little. Train? I imagined a flood. To be lifted, a bundle, by cold water, and pressed against the tops of the bushes. Ah smell of the bushes, like poplar, a sap smell. Began to close down my listening attention. Head under the bag, and a little rift for fresh air. Set up so I could breathe out into my little room, steam heating. Cold coming in only from the ground, and only in a few places. Suddenly awake. A car's headlights very nearby. A radio, voices. Instantly alert to make it out. Car doors slamming. Men's voices. They're on the bridge. I'm low to the ground, and the lights are pointing off to the left. Consultation going on. A clanking sound. Metallic clanking like hammering. A jack. Good, they've hit the hole, it has defended me nicely. More clanking. Will they retreat. Will they decide to walk? Shadows fanning through the bushes. Two of them are walking toward the place where I'm lying low holding my breath. They go back. The clanking stops. Engine starts, rrrrrrrm. A clank as the jack falls over, but they are out of the hole. Three more doors slam, and the car backs away, and its engine fades out on the highway. I'm dreaming that I'm walking in my sleeping bag, moving fast, flowing. Pass a row of windows, in one of them there is a white Greek column, fluted, wide as a redwood. I am lying with my feet next to the pillar, and in my sleeping bag with me is my sister. I wake. The dreams have been very thin, very close to waking. It is raining. It is barely raining, a drop at a time, hitting the nylon on my sleeping bag with a dry pop like little stones. It rains more, still spitting, but I can tell the water is gathering on top of me. After a while it begins to flow in through the zipper. I'm rested, wide awake, and getting bored. I'm happy. I'm so bored I get up, put on my shoes and my wet coat, tie up the pack, gather the wet sleeping bag, and get back onto the road. The red light is still flashing, but my eyes are good now and I can see in the dark. There is the wind. I wrap the sleeping bag around me and wait. When a car is coming I can see the light on the telephone poles a mile away. Put my thumb out when it spits past. Another car passes the other way, does a U-turn and pulls up next to me. A young man in a pickup. He's just going twelve miles down the road, but he doesn't like to see a chick out in the rain. Want a butterhorn? He has a plastic bagful. Want some chocolate milk? I have some of each. "Been partying?" I ask him. "Yeah, I sure been partying, I'm so stoned ..." He drives well, I say. It's his job, he drives truck, has to get up in the morning and work on his rig. We get to his turn-off. He says, I'll just stop here a bit and let you get warm. We sit and talk. I'm bored. "Alright, I'll get back on the road now, thanks for your help" I say. More wind, but the rain has stopped. The next car stops. A man with glasses and a moustache, can't tell his age, he seems middle-aged to me. Says he's going noplace, just can't sleep, so he'll take me up the road a ways. I'm a little nervous of him, he's hungry, it seems to me. He decides to take me over to Interstate 5, hitching will be better there. I've no objection. After a while I ask him how far it is. Hundred and twenty miles, he says. Well, I'd better be prepared to be sympathetic. It is raining hard, his windshield wipers don't work well, there is wax on the glass. After a while we are talking about politics, Nixon, "That man is so crooked."
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