| dames rocket 3 part 1 - march-april 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Vancouver March 1976, Avalon Rooms at 163 W Pender] Hello Ms M; here's your old daughter reporting. What a nice letter your birthday one was. Your writing is so full of hurry and dash these days, your handwriting too. I got your letter and card nearly three weeks after you wrote them because I have, indeed, been far away. On my birthday, which was Saturday, I set out walking down the beach south of San Felipe, trying to reach a point, where there was a brown mountain, but it was so far, and with shell gathering and watching pelicans, so slow, that I had to turn back when it began to be dark, only halfway there. This is Mexico I'm talking about, San Felipe on the Gulf of Cortez in the Baja, a hundred and twenty miles south of Mexicali, through desert all the way. O wonderful Baja; I longed to go back with Luke and spend a month. Am learning Spanish as a promise to myself to get there again, and NOT with Jerry Reznick, and not with the flu - both of which made it hard to penetrate the village in my right style. I'd gone to Los Angeles to see Jerry (you know him; we were kids in Rome together, street-begging; and he's spoken to you on the telephone too) who is sad and wrote "pleas come," and he had a little red Ford with a front tire that leaks only very slowly, and he said I know a place. So we went there, but Jerry has been working in advertizing and has got a little fat and soft, and very passive, and wanted to stay in motels and eat well; so I was deprived of inconvenience, which I needed. But we found a place some miles out of town where the desert ran down to the beach in the form of a little arroyo, or dry wash, a river of white sand, with sparse exquisite trees and bushes set in it, hazy blue-green branches that look soft as fennel from a distance, and make you feel your eyes aren't good because they aren't easy to make out: but up-close, of course, are thorny and pure polished bone. We sat in this arroyo for two days doing nothing. On the second, I was already very sick and just lay in my sleeping bag under a thorny tree, with circles traced in the sand underneath it by blown tips of branches, feeling it as a big strong mother. That was a right place for me. When I got to San Francisco and was unhappy and lost I looked up a book on the Baja and found some poems by Octavio Paz, about the desert:
Isn't that fine? I tried to go back in my mind to the place where whatever is not stone is light - when I was in Los Angeles and Santa Monica and San Francisco; because America, American culture, sent me into such a dull rage I felt just bankrupt, empty, angry but not with a big clean anger, more like a nausea - I was thinking of Eliot, "lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone," but the wasteland is not a desert, it is a city like Los Angeles where hamburger stands and taco palaces line the streets, and there are sex-advertizement newspapers in glass vendors on every corner and retired people with deep tans hobbling to buy Viennese cakes that taste like sweet nothing, where there is no geography but only more streets. I'm wondering why I hated it so much. I think in my young days I'd have found it wonderful in all its vulgarity; but - is it intolerance setting in with the hardening of the brain, or is it some kind of developing moral sense - I didn't begin to feel alive again until I found myself huddled in my sleeping bag in some bushes in Oregon, waiting for morning and it raining too, and beginning to leak in at the zipper! Your letter is full of news. I was excited to hear about your paper on the inner and outer. Will you let me read it? It sounds as if you have someone who'd support your application to do an MA if you like - do you like? When can you start? Could you get a scholarship? I'm glad to think of you in your freedom to sleep and wake and eat and come in and go out as you like. It's time you had it. Any way you can keep it? But you don't have treacherous thoughts like that. You're more than half my roots, don't be so modest. Perhaps not, after all; you are more than half of the parts of myself that I know, but Father put a lot of junk in my basement, shadows and maggots and such. I am thinking of therapy these days because I would like to be rid of him. My dreams still, at least once a month, tell me to kill him or at least tell him what I think of him; but it seems unlikely either of those will ever happen, so maybe I should sue him to pay for a year's work with a good woman therapist that I can't afford. It would get him off the hook too and he could afford it now. Do you think that's practical? Oma Konrad sez she thinks I don't believe in god because my relations with my earthly father are so disturbed; and it's true my exasperation with men takes energy I could use for other things; I don't know exactly how this thing works but I would like to rebuild myself without my hatred of Him, and time isn't doing it by itself. Yes the big mouldy brown house looked very naked when we had taken ourselves and things out of it. I spent one night alone there, Luke and the cat having gone, nothing left but a mattress and some old undercarpet to cover myself, snow outside, a fire in the fireplace, writing or trying to write a poem that goes "Oh bearded lady, I am like you." I didn't like to turn the lights on and expose the nakedness of the house to its neighbours, so I just had a candle to write by, and all around me, upstairs and down, the empty white rooms seemed to be quietly osmosing whiteness back and forth with the snowy dark outside. It was a good goodbye. In the morning put on the packsack and closed the door behind me like someone who had sneaked in to spend the night in a vacant house. Thank you for your birthday money, with which I've bought an umbrella, and if you think that is not thrilling, you should see the umbrella, which is Chinese, has green spokes and oiled paper webbing the color of wet leaves on sidewalks, and an exquisite handmade wooden support structure inside. It is a good hefty umbrella and not a parasol. How it has been raining here. The water pours into the alley behind my hotel room like a waterfall. (This is a little room that makes me simply happy and free like the room in Mrs Wold's house. Oh end of paper coming. Bye. Write me at the studio address. Big loving hug. Hello to Heide. - 24th of March Sweet freezias in an aluminum coffee pot, here is another real room, where I close my covers up to my chest and feel - I'm happy in this room, that binds me back to other happy rooms. I've bought beautiful things, the Chinese umbrella with green ribs and brown paper webs and a rough wooden handle, and a beautiful webbing of struts inside. That's for real rain, that I hear pouring onto the alley floor like a waterfall. A stainless steel steamer, the weeping fig, the freesias with their dry fern and gypsophila thrown in for nothing. A Chinese bowl, tomorrow a green-glazed ginger-jar. My sleeping bag, my typewriter, my desert dress - I'll hang it on a hanger - when it stops raining I'll wear it. Old things, the black pea-jacket with its lining worn through, all the buttons gone but one, and a pocket ripped half off. Wrote Luke a Tato story here, today - the coming of the brown albatross by Lucy's magic (accidental) song, and how Lucy takes charge of the situation and makes him her messenger to carry, wrapped in a teeshirt, the peony, no, sea-shell, no, stone-flower, but so weightless it seemed to float above her hands as a token to her witch-mistress, that she was ready for more advanced work. Fred Gougeon [Avalon hotel keeper, Interart Co-op landlord], when I was expecting evasion, telling me I was looking thinner and should take care of myself. There's something lovely about him, a look of tired honesty. "You're the only decent one. That other woman, the ginger-haired one, was giving me such a hard time I almost ..." Hmmm? He's a business man. But he was nice with his old teacher, Dorothy. - In the library. I spent some hours reading a play by a Vancouver woman called Beverly Simons - Peter Harcourt's generation, and his Albee style of dated anguish. Odd how we don't live like that. Aren't we old enough yet, or honest enough - what happened with Paul was like that - I'm hating Paul - dirty little man who just had to play his ugly drama of bitch goddess defiled out on me. And me prostituting myself in exchange for his privileged Irish mind, which I needed like he needed to stick his weedy thing into a cunt that didn't love him. Should be telling him that. - Just did tell him. Coco came and kissed my cheek and stood in front of me with her hair in a hedgehog brush, making her face seem white and fat, but in it her lovely features without makeup, and accurate. Got up in her splendid patched pants - she brought a drawing to show me, stars, wings, a shaved-headed black woman sustaining, in a bubble, the head of a bearded man. "I am in lawf again, but this time it is real. He doesn't believe me that I lawf him, he says I lawf everybody." He is a musician, she wants him to play with her. "I am writing so many new songs! And they have good tunes." Coco sometimes boring and unbelievable in her determined happiness. "I don't like unhappy thoughts, I think, why should I have unhappy thoughts?" But living really from hand to mouth, all over the city, drawing in the library, buying nothing. She's soaked in girlish eros and she has no animus working for her, as far as I can see - I feel she's a sort of anthropological find, a primitive tribe in her own right - but how political she is too, because she's become a tribal swarm by force of her will. I'd like to give her a medal. A tall decrepit old man came into the reading area where I had my legs spread out on another chair and knees pushed against the table (eating dried cherries out of a paper bag on the floor). Umbrella, flower packet. He said "Can I ask you something? Why are you taking three chairs?" I was smiling my customary we're-all-crazy smile, a little uneasy how long he'd pester me - would he be a good crazy? Or not quite good enough? Or just stupid? "Two, only," I said, holding up two fingers. "And fffft! to you, eh?" he said, pushing up his third finger. "When you die I'll remember you as the one who went fffft! to you." We seemed to agree that was the end of the show. He went to the pimply boy opposite, who was going through picture files, said something to him. The boy cringed, held up his hands next to his ears as if expecting a blow to the head, and pled "Old man, just go away and don't bother me." "Old man!" said the old man, in a surprised voice, but he went away and both the boy and I listened to see if there would be more frightened sparks off his naughty grindstone, somewhere else in the building. What tensions when one creature is not civilized - what extraordinary vulnerability in all the other creatures who can't handle it. Next day, in the library washroom, while I am waiting for the cubicle to be free, I am looking in the mirror and see a young woman's face peering at mine, alongside the cubicle door. I smile in the mirror, she closes her door and I hear the sound of a lot of toilet paper being stuffed into something - her pants? Then a sound like muffled laughing or crying, a mad sound, and then a trim flush-faced woman came out and looked into the mirror next to me. "Are you alright?" I asked her, because I'd been attracted by her floue and wanted some kind of contact, and had fantasized - something - mostly acknowledging her feeling existence, in case it would be good for her to be noticed - but she looked into my face with such authority it frightened me and said "If you came in here to pee I would advise you to do it right away, instead of asking ridiculous questions." I was so startled that I found I had obeyed - which irked me, so I came out of the cubicle and said "I don't think it was a ridiculous question, because I couldn't tell if you were laughing or crying." Looked at her obstinately. "Maybe you didn't come in here to pee, but if you did come in here to pee I would advise you to do it now" and she began to rummage in her bag, and I looked at her for a while and then closed the door behind me and listened to her rummaging until she left. She'd had a French accent. What was that about? Sitting with Maggie at Queenie's, holding her hand, arguing about the place. She was finding it noisy. She asked if I'd come alone - sure, I was liking it - said she didn't like to flaunt her gayness - but how easy it is for me! - and she said "If you come alone you'll attract the other people who've come alone, and they're mostly hard-luck people. You're a four-star person, and there aren't any four-star people here." But I think it was Maggie she was talking about. I identify with the hard luck people. "They just want to feel up your body" she said, but I didn't feel that at all - there was playfulness and affection and some kind of balancing of attentions - I felt I had grace to spare. Shy, tiny Japanese couple sitting at the table, Ludie in a skirt and blazer and strap shoes like a schoolgirl, and very young; Olivia skinny, in pants, with dark glasses on in the dark club, sitting with her arm around Ludie. Jackie and I coming demanding to dance. Ludie doing very contained but exact steps, and Olivia unable to do anything. Jackie, in an old teeshirt, dancing elegantly, moving around teasing us like a hostess. Elva tall and thin, like a middle-aged rancher, first playing pool and necking with a plump woman who had on a black evening dress with an orange bikini top underneath it. Hairdo like a working woman, big crude face. Mickie - I went to talk to her because she was sitting alone looking like a Claudette Colbert or like a little female Bogart - she had a sly little face with a mouth like a girl - she was 40-50, with short hair, attempted butch I think, but too pretty. She was calling for drinks one after the other. Telling me I was beautiful, flirting in the style of a man, but I was comfortable with it and felt I could detour her and still have some human play with her. "If it was a mixed club, the mediocrity, the make, would scare me and revolt me, but looking around and seeing just women, and all these women not slaves, it comforts me, and I don't mind, and I don't feel preyed on." Grace to spare. Also I loved to feel I'm attractive to women. I guess I feel that women is who'd be naturally attracted to me, and feel so goodlooking from being thin and alone. Aura like a brushfire. Hair all up on its ends, levering into the air. Maggie next to me with her demure little girl's profile on - I liked stroking her bony wrist and holding her hand. "At work today I had a fantasy about you - I never thought I would tell you about it - just about our bodies, and it gave me a rush all through me, not a big deal, but like I have when I'm with you." - Sunday. Had the same war with Maggie today as all last winter, she approached me too insistently, I pushed her away, she was soaked in rejection and put on her little girl's face - maybe that's a clue, that in her anger she's still a child and cannot operate reasoningly - I was left reasoning and explaining, Maggie it is partly your fault because you do not pay attention to how the vibrations are between us; you just do as you feel and you are not tactful, and then when you are rejected you push all the blame onto me. We had an interval, eating good lunch at the Breadline, where we talked like relatives, courteously, and then after the meeting she came upstairs and began it again. "Jim Campbell is coming over around the middle of the week and said he'd like to take me back to Saturna with him. I think I might go. How would you feel about that?" Looked at me slyly. "I'd feel fine, I'm glad if you see Jim, especially if it takes some of the pressure off me." Oh she was so insulted, at the picture of her I'd implied, as a sucking creature. I said I wanted her less vulnerable to rejection, so I'd be freer to be as I am. She went off saying she never wanted to see me again if that was how she seems to me. I said in that case she should leave me the blue pages. She said no, she'd read them and give them back. "Why are you so grievous all the time?" I said through the crack of the door. Trouble to steal my freedoms - Paul, aggrieved, and Maggie, aggrieved. At the Commodore, I had a strong presence of Steven [met on the train to LA] - my evocation of him is - an area of long narrow body, giving off a call that wants me to lock up against his torso - an anima goodness - a shine and warmth. Acted fast, wrote and mailed - oh Steven, here comes another pack of trouble but it is strong and I'll respect it and I'm game anyway, but I'll try to be wise. How am I going to make you wise - set up the limits right - I hope I don't get bored with you - brother, are you? Steven, you're a nice man, you're like a brother to me - they said. Steven what I want is this: I want to crowd up to you, I want to lay my body next to you, quietly, with clothes on, listening with our bellies. I want to look into your eyes shining shining shining at me. Dancing at the Commodore - joy, the parts of me clicking with some exactness, turning, swaying, shuffling - I can dance, look! look! young one, I can dance fine. Imagined Steven coming to Vancouver and being billeted with Paul, Hal, Wain in that happy house. The literary household, all his age. - Spent part of the night traveling - a muddy countryside with many rocks - I was on a bicycle - trying to choose - another scene I'm on a balcony shaking cherry blossoms out of a branch, leaving a woods full of clean green leaves - another scene I am carrying tapestries for an exhibit - it seems I did them, but don't remember ever learning to weave - found myself waking in a truck that had arrived at its depot while I slept, looking around, driver gone, setting out and coming to a place I've described, greasy red mud, a river and a motorway, a castle - another scene - a stream we were 'swimming' in (w/o physical sensation) - come to a narrow place were it is necessary to let go feet first through a chute and from there down a conjectured waterfall - we could see nothing further on, we were as if in a room - impersonal dreams, furnishing me with scenes and stories. - Hey room, you're receding - I do not open my eyes to a picture of a cold pigeon, framed in ice-edged rainbows. Thoughts of what to do, a little loneliness. The weeping fig in its green pot - a little soreness, like old days, thinking about Roy - Paul's ugly letter in the bottom drawer found its way next to the letter from my brother Paul, both taking the same attitude: there's something wrong with your woman, if you resent men as much as you do. I waver between wanting to reply to Paul K point for point, and wanting to ignore him in a largesse of other resources - alright, we'll not play out that trivia any more - goodbye - a new life beginning. Sorting stuff in the basement I was feeling detached from the books, kitchen tools, materials, clothes that a month ago, when packing, I felt so responsible for. As if my identity has focused in my encounters and hopes and fantasies and withdrawn itself from the objects where I had invested it like pennies in banks - Studying a biography of Edward Weston, the biographer fascinated with his "sexual greed" and magnetism, I was repelled (and cheered when, at the end of his life when he was shaking and doddering with Parkinson's, the last of his very young apprentices was seduced by his son rather than himself) at the same time as I was trying on the idea of - instead of greater chastity - greater physical ruthlessness, staying with bodies as long as they are electrifying my 'work.' He seemed to have a continuing tenderness for his lovers, male and female, survived some of them. When I open the closet door it whinnies. -
From Stanley Park when it was sunny this aft - stopped at Leah's and ate lunch and played with Sky and danced and ate dinner and sang with Leah -
A kerchief woman with bread, talking to the birds in her baby voice, swans grab bread from her hand. Park - the creatures with their behaviors we can't penetrate. Today it was the crows - blue shine on their backs when they take off - their wide-set legs give them a long stride that shifts to a hop. They do a sideways hop too. Explaining a crow to Sky. Rivalries with David and Jim. Especially David, who doesn't ask questions, only deals out information. Jim does that too. Irritation. It's gender but it's more than that, it's hierarchy-irritation. Leah with her ceramic flute, starting to get speed and accuracy when we gave her a beat. Looking worn and harassed with children. Places in the woods where trails took me in among stumps and new skunk cabbage? [sketch] (Flowers, big stamen fat as a chalk, and a reflector, hood, made in one piece, sheathed around the stalk too, all the way down to the ground. Sleeve.) Then the trails would run out - The Adrienne Rich book, Diving into the wreck, radical feminist it says. And three sons - she's writing anger poems and saying it clearly, it is possible to be public, in detail. - [sketch of a possible art piece] Take a mold, in wax or clay - clay with wax inside? Light should be able to shine down on it. Plexiglass. Wanted to brand the title in - ANGER PIECE FOR PAUL Gabriola, Galiano, Mission Monastery, Yarrow, Clearbrook, Salt Spring, Saturna, Squamish, Pemberton, Victoria, Cowichan Bay, Mexico, sleeping bag, intimacy, Steven. Why. Seattle, Bellingham, Port Townsend, Sufis, Buddhists, ferries, terminus, - Last night of Gabriola dreams - I was given a horse - very large horse - I was to learn the rituals, had a leather band on my thin upper arm, with two slashes through, to attach something - was afraid of the horse but looked into his eyes - we were in love with each other - I had to leave but hoisted myself effortlessly 10' up to kiss his face goodbye through a window - white horse bit grey. Next dream was first dream I ever remember dealing with 'my leg' - it was something worse than actually, and I was being told there was no hope. - Small gypsy man at the ferry, beaded vest designed by 'Della' [Della Rice, Indian woman], making bamboo flutes. The pony in a field, paying no attention to me like a little mockery of my dream. On the ferry - found wind shelter in a place lying next to a locker on deck - on the sundeck, although no one is here but me brave in my winter coat lying where the sun is partly hot. I draw in my arms to make room for you next to me, imagined as well as I can. You are always a body in white pants and plaid shirt well tucked in - suddenly you're a naked body lying with your knees drawn up and your wrist between your thighs, you're long and slight and you're brown from taking your shirt off at the motorcycle rallies. You're just there. Yes, well, I want to talk sentimentally about Steven - first thing I saw on the floor - letter from Seattle - I've missed you. It says little more. Wednesday, or Thursday? Oh by now I'm checking my calendar - will it have to be Wednesday? Is Thursday still safe? By now I am wanting to cleave - I am imagining myself an envelope your narrowness will slip exactly into. A whiff of your skin, just the sudden uninvited picture of you lying on deck with me with nothing on and your arm innocently covering your crotch so only half an innocent testicle is in the picture - and I am rushing to kiss your wrist - and so on - except that is as far as I know - take the edge off the lust and try not to do anything unconscious - is that right? What do I want not to happen - sexual cynicism or greed - I know I want Tony over again, but it won't happen - this Steven is young. He's passive he says, he attracts women more evolved than himself, he confesses to confused enthusiasm with 'pretty' women, but does he know anything, or will it be Andy tumbling in and tumbling out - he has a secret room - that's what I'm after - that and his lovely body which is the exact type to charm me, catalogue of lovely parts except for having wrists like mine. Now have I been honest enough so I can go to Seattle and hug and hug Steven Steenback? He seemed to be telling me everything women have held against him and does that mean he'll love me? I hope he doesn't - just sometimes when we've earned it. Ah. It will have to be next week with Luke. [philosophy notes untranscribed] - Oh oh oh - what did I expect - wonderful kisses with a postperson hockey player (wing), brown-faced, driving her racing-back car fast up to the lights like a man, pulling up in front of the hotel and waiting until I'd unlocked the door before she went off with a wave - she kissed with the corners of her mouth too, it was more conscious kissing than I'm used to - suddenly I thought, oh, pay attention, this could be good - a real person - and Mickey, when I was dancing by myself, coming to rescue me, wearing glasses - her opaque complicity, her drunkenness - I like her, I can't talk to her because she's lovely - bullshits me with everything she says - paranoia and loneliness and determined hype - check in the bathroom mirror - am I good looking? enough? too? - asked a girl to dance, Esther, who seemed frozen for fear I'd try to pick her up - and asked another, who wouldn't - No! she said, how could she? - then Nellie sat down like a hockey player in the penalty box, with her knees relaxed on either side of her wrists, and said "I just got back from playing in a hockey game." It's the glamour - I'm telling myself - not the person - but the way her corners of her mouth kissed me so carefully - oh freedom! oh women's heads with their clean hair, oh woman's brown neck, oh face like I never felt under my fingers before, with a long concave plane from the cheekbone like a shoehorn - oh honest brown eyes - I know what I want - to touch touch touch and know the hockey player body - head to foot, without having to be her lady - like a secret encounter sometimes - the postwoman who puts her arms around Mary the secretary who is weeping because she has to have another operation on her eyes and may go blind and her husband died ten years ago and she is supporting children - forty year old secretary in a furniture company. - Note on Paul yesterday (keeping the charts up to date) - how concentrated in the eyes he was, happy and himself alone. - Thinking to myself throughout this day - in my erotic feverishness - what does that kissing mean? Grownup mouth - when can I try it again. Ah, I think, here's a chance to watch close and see, what is it, what makes the mooniness? What happens when it isn't startling, for it to be possible, possible to put your mouth to a stranger's mouth and read exactly who they are with you, try out both powers at once - past the language of friendliness - I was startled because I hadn't fancied her abstractly, I'd felt nice with her, but thought she'd soon bore me because she was being social in an almost jock way, and I was remembering the electrified intimacy - like electric harmonica - of talking to Paul at the Mozart in the morning - and then she parked in front of the hotel door and I opened my door and turned to her and she leaned forward and I kissed her cheek and she kissed mine and she hesitated but didn't push and I was in a flurry of decisions fast as feathers and said, yes alright - and the new feel of her mouth and I'm still thinking about what this is going to commit me to and then all at once I notice how she is kissing me and I pay careful attention and hang onto all the edges of her moving mouth as if I were dancing by standing on her feet as she slowly moves them, one at a time - and she's noticed that I'm there, and I'm squeaking a little and holding the side of her head very lightly, just to have my hand on her head, and I stroke her neck, and hold carefully onto her tongue and roll as she rolls and she's breathing a little raspy and I take a distance and she squeaks too and I open my eyes and see her dedicated eyelids and touch the side of her face and begin to smile because I understand that she's got to me but that I'll feel railroaded if I go home with her - and slowly resurface our two mouths onto our own faces and she says why don't we spend the night - and I say because I'm scared to death I'll end up feeling like I got picked up in a bar. I thought of that, she says, that's why I didn't bring it up before, but people have got to meet each other somewhere. There's a lot of time, I say and it's true I want to think about her and what to do next. - Dreams last night - a social function where clothes were available hanging on racks, for people who wanted to be better dressed - an overwatered lawn - a garden I'd planted and forgotten, where flowers and herbs were coming up between very high hoe-ings-up ridges of earth. Tom Hathaway and his lady, he older and without the edge of intention to honesty that I liked in his lad - a 3' inscription ELLIE EPP IS HOT!!! OOOOO! done in raw egg on the wall of my house, by a drunken suitor. I was pleased to have it advertised. - The intensity of two days, yesterday phoning people about the party; today, bright and hot, going to the Blue Eagle - no, a café before it on Hastings - and drinking coffee while feeding dimes into the machine, then searching for Nora Blanck in the Empire, buying striped socks for me and a rabbitlike piggy bank rabbit for Luke - meeting Paul at the art school at lunch, reading him Paz, finding Luke's plane two hours late and sitting in the hotel room with the door open talking intently until it was time to go through the flowering streets on the Richmond Express, and then wait and talk in the ditch with early dandelions and then got on another bus to the airport and there sit on some more juicy grass in the sun, trying to stand on my hands. I'm struggling to say what happened, how it was - and haven't the energy - bright it was - intense talk with Paul - Gordon on the street modest with sneakers and a bicycle casting glances at Paul - who looked different with his neck showing - waiting such a long time at the barrier for Luke to come through - a lovely tall girl all in black, and black stockings, with a face like Roy's Madeleine but lovelier, her nose red from crying, standing at the barrier and looking and looking, fearing they weren't coming, and then through the door came a tiny old mama, all in black with a black kerchief, and a tall old dad with a thin fine face like hers, an ordinary East European or Portuguese sister with them - the girl's face was entirely red and I was crying too and Paul was hugging me and laughing - Luke came through at last sitting on his baggage on a trolley - I went round and squatted in front of him just as the woman was saying "Who's going to meet you?" "My mom!" he said and held me tight round the neck - strange with Paul, as if he didn't recognize him - until suddenly in the bus he said "Hey, Paul, how did you get here?" He was thin and hyper, it was past midnight for him but he looked fine and fresh and shouted his news. I was shocked and wanted to hold onto Paul like something honest and familiar, because Luke seemed so strange and social to me, making too fierce too adult too unreal conversation. It wasn't until we were at home and I soothed him down that he began to seem my intimate child, whom I can pick up, and pee, in his sleep, and move to another bed, all without waking or disturbing him. My single life is finished. Now I have to begin to talk again. I was more tired tonight than for weeks since I've been back. Let me try to pay the kind of scandalized attention I've been paying my crushes - And nourish the strong and sweet in him as long as it's real - gratitude for Paul today - we overextend, but meet too. - Nellie van Leeuwen - hurry to write down information - if love is sudden access to the creature in another person, then information is what it is about - Nellie whose image is vibrating with my solar plexus just now, after our entrance to - whatever it will be - big tenderness - she takes off her shirt - she takes off her jeans - comes for us in jeans and jean jacket and scarf, like a well-groomed young man, clean and her hair still wet - she's a dewy white body feeling like no body I've ever felt, her skin tight and like roses, not velvety, but like petals - white except where her face and neck attach dark and porous like a farmer's face - thought of Jerry saying, Your skin feels so alive - her compact secret body, smaller than me, perfumed with something French - the face and the manner hiding her, this soft-voiced sweet woman, her little breasts like birds' heads pointing in opposite directions. I'm understanding about gay women that the point about them is not their masculinity but the secrecy of their femininity; it is not advertised. She's in the kitchen moving fast between counter and stove - Luke goes to sleep on her bed - I look at her albums - all pop - put on Flack, she comes in and turns it down, for the landlady. When I come to her in the kitchen she kisses me, dives into it - I sit in the tiny dining room where two suitcases are stored on the refrigerator, see the last of a beautiful light come in almost flat, orange, from the horizon, through her white gauze curtains - (sheers) like an English house - she spreads the table with bowtie noodles, stroganoff, salad, and asparagus on side-plates, comme il faut, tells me she has learned about food from her friends - country woman from the Island, where her dad came from Holland when she was six - 6th in a series of 9, one of 3 daughters - younger daughter still at home, Maria - said she worked with her dad skidding logs out of the bush from the time she was 13. Left school because she refused to go to a Catholic school - at 13 she left, and worked in a drugstore, worked 5 years in a centre for disturbed children - when was that? - lived for long times with 3 women and had many other lovers - best friends are two male gays - has always advertised her gayness in spite of other women avoiding her presence for fear either of the label or of seduction - working to try to get clear - trying to 'share', her thoughts, her state - look at her level eyes, there's no seduction in her except straight forward: she leans against me, talking - we eat - she gives me a look - I say, "What was that?" - she says, "I think I am feeling shy." "Good. Me too. I am feeling it in my stomach." We both look at our plates and drink our wine. "Where are you?" she says. "I'm thinking about kissing you" I say. "Good idea." She jumps up, brisk, and starts to clear the table. I stand around handing her the wrong things. We go into the bed-sitting room where she's turning off lights and replacing the record and I make Luke a bed on the fur rug she spreads and then she's kissing me again and saying "And I'd like to make love to you too" - and I'm not sure whether to make a speech or not, but decide to find out first whether it is necessary or not - and she takes off her shirt, just like that, and I take my Syrian dress off and there we both are in jeans and she takes hers off and there's her whole white body, legs and triangle of hair and I take mine off too and then what? We were hugging for a long time - the skin, I wanted to feel it all, up and down, was bewildered by wanting to know all her body all at once and being able to see almost none of it, and to feel only part of it at any time. Luke is thrashing a little - I get him up to pee him - ask for a yogourt carton for him to pee in - she's leaning out of bed stroking my bum - body - I'm feeling I wasn't all there, my cunt never began to fire up although I was sobbing with the emotion of it. Big relief to find out she doesn't come easily either, felt easy and sweet after that about any amount of cunt playing, it was concentration exercise by which we tried to feel out each other's fleshly vulnerabilities, and it was as if not coming, we kept our hunger and a reassurance of the other's powers - I love you she said, and I grabbed her hand tight and after a while said I love you too and she said I feel that. Have been setting Paul's eye to view this and wish a little that I had an excuse to be more abrupt than I am, as with him. You're a very warm and loving woman she said. Well Nellie van Leeuwan just don't depend on it - At the party, when she appeared I said "I'm glad to see you," and in my workspace looked at her with her own bravery and said "I called you on Thursday." "Where was I on Thursday? When did you call?" "At seven, and at eight, and at nine, and at ten." Brave - her face looms in front of me and she looks at me as I look at lovers - her whole face is a straight line from her center. Feel win or lose, it's the same, because she's lovely and I have embodied ideas to learn from her. - We went to sleep - phone woke us - she was talking to someone - "Why did you phone me? Are you pissed? I can't talk to you now. I'm too sleepy." She's crisp. I pretend to be still sleeping. After a while, dimly, I hear her crying. Come and ask "Are you alright?" and she's in a sudden hysteria and cannot speak and doesn't want to tell me. "I don't want to tell you. Yes I do, but can't." And I have to be light and humorous just outside her compound, to draw her out, and she does come out, and we spend long middle-night time laughing and talking and caressing caressing and wrapped up together very close. She tells me of visiting her grandmother's house that she knew from a painting, stepping off the bus and there it was and she stood on the road with her bags and cried. Her grandmother was dying and she sat up with her. She would wake and talk about when Nellie was a little girl, about her life, then she would fall asleep again. When Nellie left she said "I know you are a good person." Another matter of fact story about trying to get through to her father, cooking for him one night, he'd "had a few drinks," he asked her to come sit on his knee, began to "fondle" her breasts telling her how like her mother's body her body was. "But I'm not your wife, I'm your daughter" she said kindly. He persisted, and she "freaked out." "It was very heavy for me, seemed almost as if it had happened before. When I was a child I went everywhere with my dad, and who knows what may have happened." She disappeared for a while into the story of Maria and her birth control pills. "She lied to him. That worries me." Suddenly she went to sleep in my arms, with noisy excited breathing that didn't let up. I couldn't sleep holding her but lay for a while and then shifted her. Luke was tossing. "Ellie," in a clear voice, "I had a very bad dream." "What did you dream, Lukel?" "I dreamt my bike went in the water." "Oh, well it didn't really, it's alright and tomorrow we'll fix it." He went to sleep. Voices in the dark. Nellie back to sleep and me too after a while. "Good morning, Ellie!" It's Luke not at all confused about where he is, and I'm telling him I have to sleep a little longer, and Nellie gets up and I hear her entertaining him in the kitchen with bananas and cream. "Will you have one slice of toast, or two, sir?" and he's talking to her not in an affected voice, telling her about stuff in a little box. "It's for a letter carrier, in England." She's asking how he likes his eggs. She comes in in an open kimono that just laps her bum and I'm pleased to see her body moving around the room, unembarrassed with Luke. Head and body, two beings. Comes and kisses me, with that steady brown look I can't read yet. Rain, planetarium, running into the foyer to find out the first event of Sunday was an Introduction to the Universe at 1 pm. Ran out. Luke is happy co-pilot, turning the key, setting the gear for P, R or D, steering, inside the parking lot. Getting afraid and shouting "It's not me driving! It's not me driving!" Stanley Park, driving past cherry tree clouds like abrupt fogs near the ground. The mermaid, a woman jogger with her teeshirt moulded to her bra, the tall trees, closed tearooms. We're holding hands against Luke's back, all contained in bliss and rainy light, warm in our bellies. Park and go to the zoo, stand inside the monkey house eating popcorn. The popcorn vender at the open end. Luke at the first cage, laughing and laughing at the monkeys - there by himself in her raincoat with a hood and the sleeves rolled up, reaching almost the ground around him - holding a bag of popcorn. We were further up to the darker end, hugging and kissing. Walked the park holding hands, two same-sized women in post office raincapes a public couple: I liked it. Story of the boy she sat next to coming from Regina, he was on a peewee hockey team and was too bashful to say he was one of the star players. - Note to myself to keep myself honest - today I was scared and evasive because Nellie came to see me first thing in the morning - and it's only Monday, when I had dreamed of holding out as long as I was able. So glad to see her and hold onto her and climb into her, that I went with her but still felt I had an uneasiness she picked up right away - she small and light in her uniform, with the big bag on her shoulder - I love her body - I love and love her body and I love the soul whose structures I feel in the body and I'm afraid that the unease of our social persons together, my educated language and her lugubrious seriousness, my fantasy and her honesty - she couldn't make up a garden - was telling me what grew and didn't have the confidence to imagine, to choose from the gardens she knew - I'm trying to understand how we can manage this intimacy of two creatures who are not alike - she looks at me so long, doesn't look at the trees or even the bear, looks and looks at me (lovely thin bear grazing new grass at the side of the road, long neck, and a downhill posture like an anteater) so I'm scared she'll be hurt if I am as I am, and from that we're going false - it is like Colin - yeah. The connection goes straight in through the body and is incredulous at the awkwardness of the personae. Speaking their different languages - feel I'm bound to carry the whole burden of consciousness for us as a connection - if I assume that she really touches me, and I am not just in some springtime froth - how can I manage it? Stay clear, grow fast, what do I have to learn fast? That's what I don't understand - I understand all the seeds of hurt and dismay that are in it - already I'm holding back my reaches because I don't want to impress her, want her to keep all the power she can keep - oh, Nellie, in your whole existence, your spirit, your delicacy, with no help from your schools or home - the beauty of your face in the dark pronouncing, in Dutch, the name of the town where you were born, and wonderfully strange in its unfamiliar familiarity. "Rotterdam." Your beautiful mouth. You ask to be with me, and I'm scared and choose privacy, even when later I want nothing more than to be with you, because I'm scared of getting bored and feeling a bad person - trying to tell you to reassure me by leaving me alone until I long for you, how little I trust my affectionate impulses. Maggie and Paul have nearly convinced me, and that is paralyzing me. Nellie, help me choose. I say no when I should say yes, to try out my freedom to say no. Tell me what you base your decision on, are you coming to me because you are called to by a connection you trust - I'm afraid you are not going to understand me. I'm afraid you're going to love me. Don't Nellie, just at moments: maybe that's what you do - I shouldn't be anticipating. When we were sitting on the old road, up Grouse, on a sleeping bag, with small trees in intricate layers, getting thinner. Brown trees, buds on them, an overturned forest - moving slightly like plants in water, and a spruce with light on it in horizontal bars - a stream cold and white coming down, wet stones, a terrain to be our problem, I want to see it. I want to be close to you, hold my arm round your shoulder, with your head on it; both of us disappear into your mother's story, seventeen, pregnant, shotgun wedding, nine children, crying as she packs to immigrate, fallen uterus - she had to put a wooden ring inside herself when she had her period - oldest daughter got pregnant at eighteen, her mother was sympathetic and helped her hide it - the woman died of cancer of the womb at forty-one. "My bedroom was over theirs, and I could hear them talking at night, couldn't hear what they said, but they sounded very close." We come out of the story in a posture it has washed us into. I'm wrapped around her holding her shoulders and we are perfect. Caressing your back, kissing your shoulder, all for my own pleasure, mouth, hand, slides, holds, presses. Another teeshirt with a feel like your skin. - Judy Lynne's house where Luke is tonight - Ellen, Sky, Neil, Lucy, the films and Jane and Suma and news of their house - a party somewhere at Dundas and 34th - woman called Pat, Eileen, Holly the photographer sick with flu - unfamiliar faces getting quickly beautiful. -
Make up songs and notate Microtonal scale - smaller than half steps - Weekend at Cowichan Bay - picture of Marnie with her stringbean shape, bird face on top of it, pale eyes alert over their dark half-circles - features like a line drawing - but best thing her presence playing pftt pftt and smiling - Nellie bent in social anxiety - a brown unexploded person with beautiful privacy - lugubrious and frightened - her blinkered tangent toward something acceptable, like Maggie's when she's not stoned - different styles of tightness. The friend in need, she is - and so she is, Nellie the Good Person - hurt when I chopped off a flattery. But Marnie and I sparing each other, not her - Lynn saying [to Nellie], like a scratch on glass - your voice seems to me to have a whining quality - oh, relief - yes, so it does - it is like a starter motor failing to start the car - feedback - I'm excited to give away my secrets, and talk her out of being sad. Nellie, tight body, broad across the mid-back, with a polished round shoulder tip I roll my hand on like a ball bearing, white hard breasts where the nipple comes up like a tough little tower - white belly, white slim thighs, hairy legs - walks - she walks straight and trim; her tight body and loose face - white body and red face - her eyes and mouth and her big nose direct like an arrowhead pointing straight at me. - [this is the first mention of 820A East Pender] Oh, sad: I want to live like Karen and Lillith, ve-ry groovy in a blue brass bed, clothes all hung together, dresses and dyke jackets, denim and dressing gowns, cats, bare wood, monumental fireplace, Chinatown all around - alas - the style of it, and instead I'll end up living in an awful stucco place with no breath of style in it, good souls hostile to Luke and myself - long hideous busride - sun straight into window - well - Jane and Suma: Jane's spirit and beauty, her delicacy - Luke would like the house - oh but it is a dreary house - I'd be confined to my room, and I don't like the room - could go out at night sometimes - music - but - Po, Maggie - the Dyke League baseball - in sum, no: stay and look for a house nearer by - Pender or parallel - Luke could go on the bus to school. Wait. - She's the first person who looks into me as I look into her - she knows instantly if I've wandered. The loveliest thing she said - "When I was a girl and first began to want to make love with a woman, the way I wanted to do it was the way I do it with you." Creating the story - oh, but what is it for - I could accept an intelligent life on that level but help us be ware of the frustrations of talk. - Nellie's dad ruffling my hair, "I luff your hair, it is like a man of a horse." Like her, not book schooling but a quick lively pleasure in people. Drunk, talking about how women don't like him - "Hippy girls are good. They are friendly. But the other ones the married ones, they talk to me, but the others ..." He writes ads and answers them. Gets no replies. He walks heavily in his plastic trailer. Broken hands. He was replacing my dad and I liked it, even if it was flirtation for him - his daughter's success with women, "Every time you bring somebody here, she is more beautiful than the last one." "That's because she is getting more beautiful herself" I told him. He shook his head and muttered "No, she is not," quietly enough so that Nellie couldn't hear. Playing his harmonica he could only play "old songs, love songs from the old days." The Latin hymn they played at his wedding. "Excuse me, I have to take out my teeth." Puts them in his shirt pocket. Little girl with a smile that leans to the right, and the right eyelid drooping a little - like her mother, they say. Adolescent with a ducktail and cowlick - she was 11 when I was 13 - Alvina's age - that name from my childhood country, which doesn't belong in this book, seems awkward to me. Always an old young person, she says. Working at 13! Here at 20. Drove a bread truck, worked at the school for 'disturbed' kids. Five years with Carole. Putting down facts waiting to find a thread. Aline and child. Bought cabin on mountain. Bought house with Carole, bought apartment with Aline. Bonnie and Marnie, the Arica influence, all the Van Leeuwen daughters longlegged and slender, Thea, Petronella and Maria. - Maggie with her mouth shrunk to a little dry anus - here, full of hate - cried on my head, tears trickling down my forehead - I turned it back on her and tried to forget what it said but it is rankling - why have I had to lend so much of my time to her growth? Blood payment for mine. Asked her why if she's my intellectual equal, she doesn't act equal. She says "Well, you're very compelling." - This dryness is hard - my shine and blaze has gone - eyes are dull - it is as if my hope is gone, because I do not have interesting thoughts - why - because I do not wake alone? - can't go to Queenie's? Is it the 5 hours a day I spend with him awake, spending myself absent-mindedly? Meeting downstairs [Women's Interart Co-op] - Maggie, Barbara and I - then Madeleine and Judy Lynn - decreeing events - we'll have an Interart Invent #2. - Making the network - it is dreary too - I'm longing for metaphysical excitement and adventure and meetings make me pure ego instead - still, it was lovely the way Judy Lynn was talking and listening - faced with Maggie and me squabbling about whether heavy dependency is as sleazy as picking somebody up in a bar - Earlier, sitting here, we started talking well about the 'place inside,' the soul, that doesn't have needs, and is where I always want to be - I'm getting excited and saying yes - and in you there is this huge gap between your soul and your social personality, your stoned oracle and your persona which is about 50% your mother ('s persona) and that is why I only want to be with you sometimes. - It does seem as if Nellie has done it instead of me, and I've walked into it: and that is part of a relief - protecting her and leaving myself open to being replaced - it just came up - "Sheila isn't the sort of person who telephones" - "I could go up to Langley" - "When I spent some time with her I wanted to spend more time" - Nellie making a picture of herself looking for somebody to hold on to - it isn't that she's angry because I set limits - it isn't adding up to anything clear - we don't have much to lose but I'm sore - thinking, huddled in bed - is this how I pay for the morning in the zoo, two post capes holding hands in the rain, Luke laughing at the monkeys. - Ouch because of finding "newcomer Chantale Akerman, twenty six" mentioned with Moreau in Newsweek. Just seizing enterprise - Duras and Akerman.
What I need - dancing Sheila's farm and Marnie's - the drive through green and yellow new leaves to Langley - the long fenced corridor for cows - the cleared field, with certain trees left where they are. Jackie the tiny percussionist sitting on her haunches calling the chickens geese ducks and wild mallards - "Come here darlings" - the pond invading pastureland - little trees planted next to henhouses - little silky chickens. "That which is not manifested, but by which is manifested that which is" - traditional definition of god - an unclear 'image' of the laws of creation, spiral, circle, the forms whose intersections are visible, like many ripples in a body of water. "Joy, sensation of the real." What we are talking to you about is the very thing you are longing for with your whole soul, at this moment, in your present state. But you give it a false name. Don't give it the name we suggest. Simply stop giving it any name at all. Persevere in this interior silence. And one day you will hear a voice that will tell you the true name. Weil talking about sex. The beautiful goes beyond our intelligence, and yet every beautiful thing presents us with something to be understood, not only in itself but in our own destiny. "Spirituality for every condition of life." My job is to engage with every circumstance - my spirituality would be truthfulness, and behind that bravery and enterprise. Science, like every human activity contains an original specific way of loving God. And this is its destination, but also its origin. Because loneliness can't be my technique, I must learn the harder way, in media res. The construction of 'woman' based on the character and beauty of the adolescent, which has no gender. Is Romanticism based on the soul of the adolescent? When joy is total and pure adherence of the soul to the beauty of the world, it is a sacrament (the sacrament of St Francis) - Forget that nothing is important but truth, there is nothing else to lose. I dream of setting Nellie free - sitting in the kitchen holding her face in my hands saying "Don't you sometimes feel like you're on the verge of breaking out of something." "Oh yes! All the time!" "I know what I want" she said turning her head out of my hands. "I know what I want? I said that! I've never said that before." Roger on the corner of Water Street telling me to be nice to Nellie, she's been through a lot. "I'm no cure for that" I say quick as a slip and then say how much I like her, to reassure him. But he was asking me to look after her. Nellie says she is not afraid of people and I think she isn't. Queen of the Straight Answer.
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