| dames rocket 3 part 2 - may 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Dreamed of a roomful of women at a conference, sitting on the floor dressed in Afghani-like silks, brocades, etc. I ask Chantale [Akerman] and another filmmaker "What do you do when you're unemployed, can't make a film?" Chantale replied "I research what seems important to me, I track it down until I understand what it is, in it, that is important." - We have the house - visions of white light - old wood - floors under the lino - Po offering to help paint. Sent Nellie roses by flower delivery and wrote a song - Woman courts woman - and thought about her nature. "I'm afraid I may fall for a dumb blond!" she said. I may not be able to take it.
Talking to Paul on the telephone, he won't have Luke visit him because it might be useful to me. Makes me furious to think how crummy it is for Luke to have people in his life who use him in relation to me, in that way. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. fr Song of Songs - Sexual symbolism of the physical union - what's the sexual symbolism of women putting their hands skillfully to each other's sexes - it seems a consciousness - thinking of it as a transition or alternative to penis-vagina - the hand is the organ of craft and skill, the most intelligent limb, the most sensitive surface of the body - both penis and cunt are relatively dim organs, immobile - for women it is a symbolism of shared control - it is practical, assuming that male-female is not usually a mutual bliss - Correspondences - synaesthesia - Wallace Stevens' resemblances - Visualization may be defined as the act of holding a definite image in the mind, through sensuous attention to shape and detail, entering gradually into the energy of transmutation 'stored' in the image. The process has obvious affinity with both science and certain kinds of figurative meditation.
Armand Schwerner 1972 The tablets Grossman - I copy this out as a text in my native language, which I must learn (relearn) by studying whatever I can find of it. I recognize its quality, I know it for my own dialect, but discover there is more of it than I've heard or remember. It is an elaborate language. Politics of the imagination - imagine Coyote, a Woman, the intellectual free woman threatening violent breaks of order - Reich - the soundest imaginable female body - Omensetter "The blood showed scarlet through the clear, brown skin of his face." Duncan The HD book 1961 The soundest imaginable female body Susie's at 16. - Interart Co-op - photo evening - Millie and her frighteningly fashionable solid art school 1976 pictures - my feeling of suddenly being able to show a few of the old pictures that haven't been acceptable before - Karen's several beauties - Maggie's discomfort - Want to hurry up and tell about Nellie at the Chat Noir [weekend coffeehouse held in the free school basement] - her presence, the public presence, not like Maggie's lurk or Paul's shine - she has a loose easy interested look, she's narrow and polished in her clothes, but looking around and talking to people - there was Judy Lynn doing soft body shuffles, muffin urchin girl; there was Holly tousled boyish peering disappearing; Maggie the opera singer friendlier having decided, from my space and books in the [studio] basement, that I have enough class; Elaine big and sweet, hands in dungaree pockets; Ferron lurching bearish and almost massive until she sinuates into her sexy-ironic performer and gives off secret power we gape at in pure respect; Jane sly and thin, body is stiff around the guitar, but her voice and music were growing bigger and braver - Fucking as a neural rolfing technique - my head and a strip of lower back buzzing as if the orgasm were trapped there - hands also - what really does happen? Woke light instead of heavy - the fucking cries downstairs coming up clear as music through the heating vent - I stood in the middle of my kitchen and closed my eyes and sang a hymn that vibrated in my legs - reply to theirs. Holly and I looking at each other yesterday - telling Judy Lynn - telling Nellie - grace to spare. - Things going by unmeditated - the session at Co-op Radio with Jane, Gayla Reid of Room of one's own, Judy Morton, Elaine - my awkward interview, Elaine and I reflecting sudden blanks at each other - the house and its labour, coming home tonight to cockroaches the size of grasshoppers, and many of them - work - stripping - painting - parents' choice of new staff meeting - bought seeds and dream a garden. - Days banging nails out of boards - disassembling, assembling - reading not a word - writing this unpoetic note at the end of the day by candlelight - a few people quite vivid, Maggie crying in the kitchen - she brought a bag of presents - because of her job - ah-lienation, feeling she can't make it in the outside world and indeed she has lost three jobs since I've known her, and failed to get nearly all the jobs she applied for - she loses all her lovers - because she crowds them - her paranoia, and her eagerness to please - her 'mystical books', her mania - Pleasures today - Luke coming and stroking my bare chest with the palm of his hand, before I was really awake - Nellie vanished early, and I woke alone clear in my own day - the kitchen has lilacs in it - this morning it had a countertop and the closet was scraped ready to polyfill a little more. Tonight the counter, wet dark and full of cockroaches - the little Viet Cock with their thousand eyes watching from the edges of raised wallpaper - is gone and the closet has beautiful brown-black-silver pots on one shelf and white and blue plates on another. The yellow new chair is half stripped. After Luke went to school, sun today. I got off at North Star Salvage and found a sheet of thin brass, a green shade, an orange wood box, and another wood box - carried them home, worked on taking apart that desk. Gail stopped by. Desk made beautifully with little rabbits and tenons - everything slotted together almost without nails. Nellie came back bringing her saw and paint brushes, kissing me goodbye. M at noon, sadly but faithfully peeling wallpaper in the bathroom. Finished with the shelves, put on clean jeans and the white Indian shirt and went to the bank and bought a cantaloupe for 25 cents that was delicious. Got Luke who was grumpy, took a picnic to the park on the orange wood box we turned over to make a table. Tore down the cabinet, stripped the chair. Last night when I'd had a little sulk I opened my eyes to see Nellie's face on the pillow looking like the girl on the tractor - "'Nellie is half boy' my mother used to say, and she was proud of it too" - I was vacuuming her into me through my eyes and through hers, I was coating my inside with her like a breath - oh Nellie, and nothing I wanted to say either - just staring into her ravished with love, which is attention - her narrow face, her features all with one push - - Berger Commission hearings on Co-op Radio. A nun from Okallah, fluent and poetic about environment - cedar - the idea of the commission is lovely, a traveling circus in which individual people and representatives of groups of people present briefs, in all their shy or suave idioms, talking about all sorts of issues - what can come of it - will the corporations win? Demolishing the t&g off the side of the building on Abbott - Peter the man with long red pigtails helping, with Maggie's hatchet - Shirley - Luke's sweetness and telling Leah the dream about her - These days of immediate tactical concerns - plaster falling down at the ceiling, four rooms and a corridor needing intelligent labour - in what order? all at once? - thought of the poetics of renovation - I like the fixation on material but I miss my intelligence and feel stupid when I stop to write - is it Paul I miss? My 'women's community' doesn't help me speak, on the contrary it leaves me startled banging gates with myself on one side and Them with their trivia on the other - it is my community of 'ordinary people,' I tell myself but indeed that may be the last thing I really need - now it's my politics that is taking me back into the loneliness of childhood on account of my search for community - now I seem to have chosen these people who have rich possibilities in them that they repress because of the culture? - Nellie in the park crying unobtrusive tears out the corners of her eyes when I talked about her burdenedness, her heaviness, how I would like to make her fly - Nellie self-defined quite apart from a gift of fancy - gravity-ridden Nellie van Leeuwen self-made woman what a beautiful face looks at me above her yellow shirt, her face too ricochets between the delicacy of the girl, her clear adolescent and the worn reddened creased face of the woman who compromises - I am saddened and silenced by not being able to explain to her how, in what way, I love her. I call for Paul Kinsella to understand it, so that I can go on loving her in that way. 'Love'=attention, not something else. She is partly indifferent to me because she knows so little about me. I feel her limits. I flounder feeling I have no right to love her because she doesn't understand me and because I feel her limits so strongly. Watching cockroaches - building legs for the counter with the sabre saw that heats up when sawing 2x4's (actual 1 and a half by 3 and a half) - cockroaches found a bit of food on the floor - they're cleaning it - Ms magazine - the Co-op - I think I'm crazy, too much is new - feels like Nellie is gone forever, or could be - Lilith and Karen stirring, their music noisy up here - smell of supper I can't have - burning pork chops - cleaning at the daycare - bank - buying a book at Richard Pender - a woman in a shop being rude when I touched a scarf - because of the battle jacket? - pansies, pansies - bewilderment. - After the Interart event #2 - depressed because I am a hostess and thereby lose all my radiance and do not interest Vera Williams or anyone who might interest me, in my snobbery - Fran begins alert but goes into boring obsession - Vera reading her poems so charmingly, smiling out from behind the seat I made with a garden gate at 2706 - meetings taking place all around - Nellie goes off with Wendy who I fancy myself - Luke depresses me - Maggie harasses me with little non-questions and disguised self-pity - voices call me from all directions - I am not really there and miss myself and feel impotent - the house in rubble all around me - sense of compromise with Nellie, she's offered me tools, comforts, good help with Luke, relief from cooking, transportation - I am compromised because she doesn't know me - oh she knows something - I have to think of how much more strenuous I could be with Paul - when I run out of Nellie's otherness and mythology there isn't much left - who's her persona, she's a party girl, arrived here drunk at half past midnight coming from a nightclub - she doesn't have a private self - her self is all social, does she look into women for a private self, as men do? Except that her social self is really inhabited. We like making the legs for this table - but she made them and I helped, it worked out that way - last night in the car going to the coffee house we were singing Oh how lovely is the evening is the evening / when the bells are sweetly ringing sweetly ringing / BING BANG BONG - Luke was responding to her charm with charm of his own, she evokes a lovely child. Shelley's painted world - Barbara's puppets, she says "I want to bring people through all the emotions" - I feel the responsibility for these women's genius, they need expert attention, they need mothering and how can I be that attentive person thinned down as I am, losing my presence - Maggie is getting her freedom in the group, but not Phyllis - who'll mother me, lost in my renovations - Nellie does, but who is she and what language does she speak - "Thank you for sharing that with me" - the whine of the ingratiator - - [I commit to a] Bridget Riley seminar Thurs afternoon May 27 Do, a craft, a way, a mystery - the do of satori, which is lucidity, being awake Disciplines of it, doing hard things, taking risks All notebooks here Class and community - be aware of energy - delegate Creativity seminar - automatism techniques Messages on walls - stencil and spray Disciplines of spontaneity - courage Try eating protein in the evening for better waking Work and love are the two sacraments - I shouldn't forget Zen shocks Eidophone - what shapes do sounds make? Here the living self stands like a lamp in a windless spot - OM A ladder into the attic - necessary Tea garden Collect some right music Not to abdicate my spirit to Nellie or anyone I am a great space that enlarges, this is what I was born for, to fight embodied sleep. Speak the truth like Mafalda Diligence - The woman on the bus, so beautiful - pale blue eyes rimmed with darker blue, long strong nose, thin scarred cheeks, large soft mouth v precisely cut - she sat looking out the window, turning her face to me - I hung from the bus's rush hour bar, very aware of my arm bare down to the khaki sleeve, because I was so aware of her - she sat like the Queen of Tragedy, in a hairdo like a sleazy waitress. As the bus emptied I moved back to where I could see what she was wearing, something like a brown banlon sweater and brown stretch pants, a pearl? necklace - neat Salvation Army clothes of the fifties - she seemed to date from an earlier time, a wartime beauty, and she could have been forty five, but probably less - wedding ring? Rings on her left hand, but the stone a red one - she has sensed me looking at her and I have held her look because she is thrilling and frightening me. When she gets off I follow her - her smile takes away her look of high destiny - I ask to photograph her and she says she isn't photogenic - thanks me and runs away up an alley - I feel I should have talked her into it - she goes up the alley with her bag of groceries - She had a look like Nellie, that was my first thought - sometimes Nellie looks like a queen of tragedy, and sometimes with her burnt face and loose chin she looks like a drinker. Sometimes I see the direct wedge of her girl's face. A woman's woman, and always was, in her neat tiny strong fast body. Hockey gives her orgasms. A racy body. - Women's women: the pleasure the thought gives me. Women's beauty and spirit to be available to women, women's privacy and intimacy. I'm thinking of Mari. I wonder whether - I muse on whether - I have always been turned on ('bent') by my need to make women free to give themselves to me - or whether my actual desire has come after my politics found it necessary to give up the idea of heterosex. Nellie's sex so deep and immediate, the way she made love to me yesterday, more excited herself than I was. She melts, she burns. Last night we went to sleep with my arm over her. Even in the dark I think of her body as white. When she lies on her back her breasts are like warm stone. Her body holds together, torso in one piece. Mine, when I lie on my back, is like a field of boulders - chest, hips, thighs, separated from each other by spaces where the skin retreats. In bed last night, had a sensation in my breasts like open drawers. Thought of Dali? painting. And wondered how much art I could understand as kinesthetic analogy. The woman who made an ice cube tray with little safety pins embedded in the 'ice' with the pin edges sticking up. - The Northern Hotel. Locators - people who put other people onto land. - House - kitchen - fill holes / paint window-door-skirting-floor? / move stove / plumb in sink / paint walls 2 coats / table paint / counter legs / counter surface / floor? Reward - get to do my room! Soccer game with Nellie playing. Luke red-cheeked from kicking a soccer ball, making his own contacts with Carol, Mary and a man passing, who could juggle the ball with his toe. "Where's Nellie?" Shouting "Hello Nellie" in his little voice. She running like an engine on her thin unsoccerlike legs, making her friendly contacts with people around her - Laurie, Ano, Joannie, Gordie, Po, Chris, Barbara. The deepness of sex evading me nearly always - makes me sad, makes Nellie sad too, she slides into it so easily. - Plaster dust abrading my hair and fingertips - t&g in a band along the side of the kitchen, where the holes were - little ideas for fixing the spaces. - At the journal reading. Jan [Abbey] in Afghani rags, barring her teeth at the end of a sentence, reading journal entries like little piles of rock chips, surging away into past times and leaving me steering the group away from her back to whoever was reading. Maggie in the big chair away at a tangent, sitting like an old female frog, too much of her, serrated and toothed with her full of feelings hands, salamander, but avaricious, a glitter, a lurk, when I looked at her in the beginning I had to look away, her mouth bare and stretched into speech like a fishmouth. She's not a dry and furry animal, she is one of those who is not slimy but makes us think of slime. She is too much. She read three recent poems, one very fine, another about coming to see me that ended "Do not fold here, do not cut on the dotted line." Then an Anne Sexton poem with an image of a wallet with the Foreign Exchange inside. Leah so small-bodied faint timid and tremulous, when I'd read the goodbye goodbye section she said it was magical - she writes timidly in correct sentences, I was curious and embarrassed that timidity could extend into the private voice - what are the keys of Leah who wants to grow so badly, who is all formless spirit. Our four separate forms, how we've made our own shapes in this unshapely culture. - Looking back over the little history of this love affair, which has opened me to such an extent that I am wearing perfume, and no longer afraid of my boredoms with Nellie - wondering where the power balance is teetering toward - for all her limits and banalities I'm respecting the depth of my connection with Nellie van Leeuwen, and she is betraying me, out of that safety. It is reminding me of Roy and I'm wondering if this is a second chance in which I can improve on my first failure, or whether it is a repetition I should stop dead. In both cases the other person's blindness to my gifts is taking power away from me: it is unfair I tell myself, to refuse to love unloved, when I've had pleasure in being unloving loved. I've refused to see her for a week while she sorts it out. It took such a long time to wrangle the truth out of her this morning - she's fair when she knows, though. - Your face became dear to me - I am realizing that I hardly address you, you are my sex object, my dear, my white worn lady, my secret treasure. Oh I speak to you I push you my hard truths, I open my liver to you like a book - I stumble to tell you that my love for you is straight as a taproot and goes straight down too, I tell you, but nothing in our conversation creates what I tell you. I talk to you from my reserves. Still your face is dear to me. I saw last night how hard and crude it is, you're monumental when you are turned away. Drunk and stoned. Fleeing. Coward. Whore. Compulsive. Sweet woman. Secret. Six-week marvel. Bitter pill. You're mistaken, I'm telling you in my defensive mutter, you're too stupid to realize what a resource I am. Why do I lend myself to someone too stupid to see me. Sounds like Maggie when she nags me, except that I know the answer: I do it for my own reasons, for my own adventure. I don't complain. I do complain and maybe it comforts me, but I am trying to watch the complaints like a radio voice. You threw me away, it says, I say, and you'll never have another chance. You'll be sorry. Won't you! Maybe not, bitch. On your way are you? What's next. Always in love, are you? Not with me you won't be - I should have asked for references. Next time. Your face, its old crude red face, its cake-slice girl face, its head soft on the pillow. This morning every pore was open and your face covered with sweat, red, rough country woman's face looking at me hard. Its secret still intact. Cry will you. I've seen tears like that before, when I was about to be slashed. "I love too fondly but not well enough." He cried - did I give you this power, or is it your pattern? What was it you needed? More rough? More lovey? More sexy? "You're a sweet loving woman" you said, and that's what you made me. I'm not, I disagreed, I'll be bored with you I said, I'll betray you in my imagination. But I love you, how did you do it. I did it. I looked at you hard, and I saw you, oh I saw you, I paid you good attention, I didn't look away. I had a good time.
Thought you'd be there for a while. "Oh, I am" you say, "I don't stop caring." But: How cheap and foolish I feel remembering every day since Wednesday, because you were holding your secret against me. You kept coming to tell me, and I didn't force you to, and wondered why you were odd. It's my responsibility, if I take it, and I will take it. Baby, baby, it's over, yes it is. How would I trust you again? How would I dare to give you anything worth giving, again? I don't forgive you for letting me walk around in blind fool's paradise, as you did. I've brought your name up in conversations all week, feeling sure of you; it shames me. Gave your roses away, they were too symbolic to keep around. Easy come easy go. My symbolic revenge. Love is a biological trap, I said to myself. Loved you and changed my mind: love is a sacrament, I said: it's there like a constant surprise to test ourselves, our secret reserves, our preserved adolescent, our deepest part. Wore perfume for you - you didn't know what a gesture that was - first time (in ten years) I've wanted to decorate myself for a lover's pleasure - not for power, but to return the pleasure I had from you. Dear Nellie, I'm not here for anything thin, false, or untrusting, from you. I think you blew it this week. I think we can't reconstruct, even if that's what you decide you want. Part of me shrieks with grief and disbelief when I say that. Part of me turns calmly back to my own resources. That much was for you and now I'm on my own again, with this book - saying - did she ever love me at all? I never was crazy about you, she said. "I was very excited about seeing you that Saturday, and then you said you were trying to phone me on Thursday." She lay under the covers and said "I love you." She meant it. I held her resourcefully, making love to her, and said "I love you." I did. I trusted her. I came to trust myself, because she learned not to crowd me. I started to be unsure of myself and tried to be pretty. When she arrived at the party I was so happy. She wasn't there for me. She sat in the kitchen with her leg over Padi's leg. I thought nothing of it, her arms and legs are always around everyone. I snuggled in, I was proud and confident, I was inside at last, after being outside all evening. Padi after a while said dryly "I'll have to take my leg back now" and left. Let's go, said Nellie, wan, drunk, stoned. In the car it was me collecting her up and kissing her hard. Thursday. The Wednesday when I didn't come to dinner she went to Queenie's. "At Queenie's bougeying up a storm." Thursday when Leah was here - all in fresh blue - I lit up like a girl and kissed her very warm and when I got her into bed I said I wouldn't fuck her because I just wanted to touch her and I did touch her beautifully and she made love to me with her whole body and we confessed how our fucking stopped being interesting when we tried to come and then we were happy and talked and giggled late and I said "Oh there's so much to learn" and she said "Now you sound like me." I felt we had some time. I was confident. Why wouldn't she love me as well and deep as I do her? It is unnatural if she doesn't. Oh well. I am not resigned, but I am not going to be used by her loneliness. Dear lovely woman, so impatient. Will we become old friends? I soused myself with her, I drank her up, childhood, child, woman, man. Man. Nellie is half boy. I was interested in her. She helped me in other ways, tools, car, friends. I'm lonely. I'm lonely for you. Yet I don't want you here. I wouldn't have anything to say to you. I don't want your fresh adventurous flesh near me. I look forward to pain. I chose to be my lone unloved transient again. Oh but it was good, I won't sour-grape myself out of the loss I really had. My captivation is over. I choose to leave, knowing it's back to the bearded lady.
- Now I'd like to work out what she did and how she did it - noticed myself falling in with her ways - thought, oh this feels like Roy, her car, her money, her tools, her skill with people, her inability to tolerate loneliness or enjoy it - how skillful she was with Luke, making him love her and be proud of her - "I see his needs very clearly" she said. What needs of mine did she see - physical help, food, money, magical transportation, driving lessons, tools and skill, introduction to her women friends. The needs she didn't see: talk, thoughts about the world - she pulled the world in around our heads like bedclothes, she hasn't a thought for anything but intimacy. Seems to me that in this women's community masculinity and femininity are valued differently - masculinity is admired and respected - 'femininity' is secretly craved as object. I'm confused about my place - it doesn't feel as if I'm going to be valued, nobody is recognizing me. Writing Nellie letters I'm noticing two things - one is that I'm addressing Padi through them, because she may understand them or feel them as Nellie won't; and the other is that hardly any of my experience in these days is relevant to her and speaking to her of it is self indulgence, in my loneliness. Harking - listening - back to last week Sunday when I opened straight out and said "I feel I am going to lose you, and I am not ready yet, it's too soon." - Fraser Valley College - women's festival - Marshall Road Abbotsford May 28 and 29 - Trying to understand, this surfaces: whenever I love fully it is because I am unambivalent about the body I love. When I love 'successfully' with insouciance it is because I am not attached with childish joy to the body; ie it is a pretty body that I need, to open me into a 'good' given lover. But that is what everybody else needs too. Am I a pretty body to someone else? Yes! I'm afraid not. "I see you, I see you, tra la la la la" sings Luke across the table. Jung said the problems of life are never solved, only passed by on the way to next problems. I think about this problem as if there is a solution. I've written Nellie to say Baby baby it's over yes it is, a pop song message, a little self irony there - it's revenge, precaution, resolution, and not necessarily final. But it will depend on whether I get my radiance back and whether I feel she really wants it. - She'll think I'm schitzy when she reads it - oh pleurez et recommencer - look at myself in the mirror and see how grey and old I look - hand shakes - I am playing with poisons all day - stripper, solvent, plaster, gloss paint - bruises, cuts - forget to eat and have no money for protein - debts, threatening letters, telephone doesn't work - loneliness - Paul away planting trees - rain - can't find things which have no place to be put - am oppressed by just the inconvenience of everything - need looking after - feel too old for the women's community to fancy me - too specialized in my own way to be nice to friends like Judy Lynn. I can't sleep for hours and so I know that grief has penetrated my body. - Saturday June 19th Simon Fraser dance - Big blaze talking to Norma at Biomedical [UBC office that allowed artists to use their copy camera], when I'd successfully done the Bridget Riley - striding in the silver boots, wearing the crystals, holding pink flowers in my buttonhole - talking excitedly to Norma about love - she's so quick and dedicated and mature - I'm the stable one, she said - I opened something and she opened back - and her eyes shone at me - even Vic Doray asked me what I was doing these days and I told him until his eyes crossed. The art school and all its tools - Your shoulder is cold as silver in my hand sings Ann Mortifee. I'm only beginning with women's bodies and if I learned I might be as successful with women as Nellie van Leeuwen - so says one of me - another says, you're a Don Juan and a seducer and I was conned and deserve war damages - but it makes a difference that Nellie is female, and I have at least got a chance with her victims myself - even if I do not have a car. What was it she said "You're the first woman I've met who is as --- as I am." She was wrong, but if I'd remembered, I'd know what it was she was looking for. Queenie's or the Sufis Thursday? Lovely Pat on the street corner - talking about having a best friend - practicing in the basement, dancing. Talked to Norma about will. The Co-op: making. "Guess what I like best in the world. My daddy and belly dancers." Norma says she's trying to learn to go with things - to let go of will; I say that more than ever will seems to be what love is an exercise of. - At the Tug, in the white room with its faded tablecloths, which evokes hot sun although it's raining and the windows are steamed over, Leah, sitting across from me in her white kitchen apron, and both of us behind a palm, tells me that on Monday night this is what she dreamed (it was when I couldn't sleep): "I am in a large meadow, with trees, flowers, medicinal herbs. I am feeling that what I really am is none of the things I am actually doing - I am not an artist, or a musician, or a mother, or a writer - what I really am is somebody who lives in this meadow and gathers useful herbs. I feel that my feet are planted in the earth. They are part of the earth. And at the same time I am reaching for the stars. There is no contradiction or difficulty in this. I am sitting in this meadow and I think about you. I feel full of love for you, and I want to put my arms around you, and comfort you. the feeling I have is of two little girls who put their arms around each other without sexual feelings, or embarrassed feelings - I am thinking, I love Ellie and I want to tell her I really am a lesbian, but I love men. I felt I must come and confess this to you." We both shouted with laughter. - Last week I phoned Leah and told her a dream I had about her. I am outside a church where a wedding is going on. I feel alienated by the sexism of the ceremony. Gradually my discomfort turns to rage and grief. Leah gets up and walks into the church and announces her feelings to the congregation. It is like the little MB country church. I am comforted and encouraged and I shout out my own anger with greater force. I see a beautiful yellow evening sky ahead. - Queenie's. Odd time talking to a terrified woman called Lyn. Nellie there, and me peeping at her, but without any magic, odd blurriness of her face, Padi's electric little body, so much less substantial than I imagined, but a hard embrace, and she said "I really needed to do that." Little community - I feel I could learn to engage there - I could learn slow courtship and straight talk and courage and patience - mirroring - it excites me to go there - all the situations are new - what is the truth of this moment? Is there anything in this person that interests me? What can I do to stir this up? Grace for the seminar tomorrow - to guide it. - Thought I'd like a sort of silicone seal, a zipper in my belly, to open and close easily, as suitable - when I saw Nellie yesterday with her hair grown out and the dimness in her eyes and her face somehow slack, I was comfortable and had no ice in my belly and did not feel her power, only my own: but I woke at 5:30 this morning, and have my little cold morning loneliness here. To close away from magic and wait until it comes again. - Oooh - coffeehouse, Jane and Suma and Trish? (Nelson - parents in peace movement) and Sue? - Colleen - haggard, her marriage breaking up - Jane next to me allowing me to indulge in moroseness - looking at the sitters and the dancers, in the same banal music which is becoming familiar and dear to us. [disco] The familiar faces - lovely, unlovely, half-grown, half-ripe, hard soft delicate crude - charm of being unknown - possibilities of bodies - Oh Queenie's - Nellie, Nellie, Nellie's tight body dancing, Nellie's familiar face looking into her friends' faces - Aline was there - in a skirt, and bigger than Nellie - not as I imagined - telling Jane, and Jane telling me a beautiful story about an imagined universe where three worlds orbit near the sun - 3 sisters, Inner, Mid and Outer - a woman pilot who does work for the women's underground - a woman spy - the two of them pitted against each other - she's saving money to take a trip to Deep Space, which is like a pilgrimage - people do their tapes of voyages like concerts - I tell her I know a woman pilot who is good with machines and very direct, but terrified of the Deep Space voyage - then Nellie comes over and I say "This is Nellie, she's the pilot I told you about." Nellie sits down. "This is also the lady who dumped me" I say. "That's some introduction" says Jane as Nellie flees. I feel much better and buy a beer for $1.25 and tell Wendy the waiter she's smiling again and talk to Tish about radical lesbianism and herself - she's lovely - and after a while see Nellie leave by herself and run after her and she says can I take you home and I say surely and we hold hands through the quiet dark streets and park outside, magically, under a streetlight, so the windshield frosts up while the motor runs - and we're both happy and we still love each other and speak beautifully and clearly to each other and do not fall away, and she says my letter was beautiful and clear and I am happy she understood it, and she says she's been thinking a lot and I say some of the things that have made me heavy - and she meets them all sweetly but honestly and we kiss and hold and desire each other and I imagine a campsite for us and we leave happy in that way and then I have to wake Lilith up to get in - Nellie hasn't utterly closed to me and that's all right and frees me. - Strange coming and going. M's [my mom] manners, her physical clumsiness, growing on me like rats, oh ugh, and the silence of aversion - Nellie giving me her attention - they talking about education - glad to see them gone, and she was glad to go, left with stiff smiles on their faces and I turned to Nellie in relief - big sunflower in my belly - she cooked, she talked, she said how she needs to be needed - I'm writing this to get to the parts I have to think about - which are - we talked in an atmosphere of bravery - I'm irritated because she seems to assume I'm here if she wants me - she's ready to feel guilty and split - "Part of me wants to stay with you, part of me wants to get down to the city, part of me wants to see Padi" - I stare at her and say about the sunflower and how sometimes it just goes away and I look at her and think who is this woman. I said we realize there really was a crime committed and I really was wronged and you really do have something to feel guilty about - and what it seemed to come to was that she's done me social damage with my peers, and the group of peers who are my only recourse in this town - it's puzzling me this sudden feeling I have about peer group, and having to make it into a particular one and being shuttled back to school and the in crowd and myself as outsider choosing other outsiders as friends - a form of thinking poor - while looking at the pretty people from outside - also the social structure as a hierarchy in which I can find a way - challenge - maybe a feeling of being stuck - I think maybe it's time to look outside this lot and let it come to me - I'm excited by this peer group, in love with it, thrilled at being seen and noticed in it, waiting to learn whether I can be myself in it or whether it's murderous ready to defy its little proprieties and stand above it. Abrasive encounter with the Gay Caucus today - walked into a room with thirteen men in it, one of them ignorantly offered me a chair and made me go through a theatre of refusing - "I don't want it, thanks" - he insisted - "I'm not a lady" I said - I was invisible to half of them, many sat in unfree silence listening to three men making themselves important - they resolved that there are no gay issues to be made at Habitat and continued to be visible to each other - I had hoped to be visible to a few gay women, and this lot were irrelevant, except for one, who looked into my eyes and held on until I smiled at him. The Forum has numbers of vivid intelligent faces - I can do better than Maggie, Cory, Paula, Padi etc - they are an artificial peer group and it is the connection with Nellie - failing - that makes me think I need them. I want to know how this circus works and what is free or false in it. When I love Nellie it is a joy to me. It goes away in both of us. We will never be where we were, again. It was she who said it. Why did I let her - I thought maybe you were interested in a conquest I said. I was shocked - etc - but I was ashamed my hunger for her had let her get as far as she did. It was right that she left. Negotiations. Game with its moments of the soul satisfied. Does Nellie know about this game. Worth playing because the soul is briefly satisfied with the smell of Nellie's neck, the feel of her shoulder. Nellie in a guise of perfect lucidity. Haven't tested her out far enough yet. Luke is going away [my mom has invited him] - look at her and see a presence / or an absence. And am delighted. We are like the warriors looking at each other with profiles facing the audience. Wrestlers as they wait. Country place. With the best of them. I like Jane. It is because I know, in a belly pocket, that Nellie is good for me and I can win - something - by winning for myself. Mary accepting my revelation about lesbianism, not seeing, she said, in what way it is different from being good friends with women. But seeing a cross-dressing woman at the coffeehouse, seeing her stoned, she fled their noise, crudity, sexuality Don't like the way Nellie dances. Her body is stiff, tight-assed and hunched. We are experimenting in this community. Would I choose if I had a choice? The mediocrity, the forced adhesive heartiness; even Jane and Suma, the way they haven't got a silence in them - ride their wild wit their sad forbidden liveliness too hard, it straggles and confuses - I make or try to make my balance where I can with them - they don't know me yet. People seem ready to disregard me and I wonder whether it's my way to pick up slow credibility - ? Work, I say. - I felt I'd been skating on thin ice, but that I'd been doing it really well - I told her - she wasn't listening by that time - to remind her not to indulge in guilt. But she does. -
Lesbos - Aeolians - She was probably small in stature, not at all Amazonian, and probably dark in coloring. She had long hair worn knotted at the nape of her neck. She dressed carefully in purple and gold, often with leather sandals dyed to match. As was the custom of the day, she wore kohl on her eyelids and was heavily perfumed. Flowers were worn twined in her hair. She was what our society calls a feminine woman. Fiercely individual, deeply sensuous, she delighted in the use of mind and body.
Artemis is a lesbian figure in Gk mythology, a protector of wild things, Camilla, whose father, pursued by enemies, had heaved her, tied to a spear, across a river to be protected by Artemis. Flowers - graces - - Women alone know how to love. Stay with us Bilitis, stay. And if thou hast an ardent soul, thou wilt see thy beauty, as in a mirror, upon the bodies of the women thou lovest. Possibilities of high play and beautiful theatre that I feel when I read about Colette. Stein was operated upon and found to have a calcified uterus. My fullness sometimes, with Nellie of the straight answer's old queen big nose profile, thrilling creature / in her thrilling specialties partialities, makes me feel I might actually have a future with a loving mate - astonishing feeling, that something might be right, full, balanced, and exciting - Nellie dreamed, just before she woke in the night after we necked and spoke in the magic steamy car - that she, Luke and I ran through the park; I asked her to live with me. I wrote the book [Thérèse et Isabelle] at a steady three hours a day, with Isabelle's river tresses in my mouth, in my throat There was more to be said, and I was unable to say it. I failed; there is no doubt in my mind about that. I don't regret my labours. It was an attempt. Other women will go on from there, others will succeed where I failed. Violette Leduc Stein said "I like loving. I like mostly all the ways any one can have of having loving feeling in them. Slowly it has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me." I suspect that by driving myself into the lesbian corner, one more isolation, I will force myself to come out in the other areas of my life - intelligence primarily - I also feel that if I establish my sexual preference, more than preference, choice, of women, I can be free to be again the womanly and self-rooted and profound things that I am - When Luke is away, tour the northwest coast dykes to find what's, who's, there.
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