| dames rocket 3 part 3 - june 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Dinesen. Her youth was a first draft. She was never more beautiful than in her seventies. It seemed as if her whole being had been invested in that accomplishment. The beauty of young women is, when it exists, an effortless thing. Karen's face was something, I think, she had been trying to achieve, and finally succeeded at. Judith Thurman We women, who were the vessels of virtue for so many thousand years, the receivers of love, had the greatest difficulty rejecting what amounted to our spiritual privilege, our 'salvation'. To do so, we have had to ... The erotic and the heroic were the two subjects that women writers of the previous generation had not tackled. Her characters have a remarkable - you could call it perverse - integrity toward their identities and their sexuality. Nor do the hardships of childhood, marriage, disease or worldly failure ever succeed in making them neurotic. In that heroic world, where neither Freud nor Marx has ever set foot, people do not have 'problems', they have complexities. Hippolyta. "She drinks, rides, hunts, judges, kills, commands, cures. She has to do with men of all kinds, and never does one sense, in these relations, the slightest surrender of her sovereignty." It was really with her particular - in English you would say private - life behind her that she began to write in earnest. She was forty eight. She had come home to her mother's house in Denmark, at Rungsted, with no money of her own. three pure joys in life. The first is to feel that one has an excess of strength; the second is the cessation of pain; and the third is to know one is fulfilling one's destiny. [This may have been from Judith Thurman 1973 Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen: a very personal memoir Ms 2(3) Sept 1973. Thurman's Isak Dinesen: the life of a storyteller wasn't published until 1982.] - N brought Padi here, to see Karen and Lilith, after saying, yesterday, "I've got a lot of commitments tomorrow, so I won't come to see you." Felt like a face slap, some deliberate wound. Padi is going tree planting, Nellie will be lonely, she will be all loving and what will I say? I will say, baby, I like to talk to you, I like your look but I don't like your symbolism and so I am going to introduce some of my own. I'll be your friend, I'll be happy to be happy feeling up your shoulder like a doorknob, but you are never going to get your hands on my cunt ever again. Do I want that, for more than symbolic reasons? Is the cunt the seat of trust? 'Owning' the cunt is a social testimony, and I am at the moment excitedly and actually involved in the social, for as long as it seems a possibility to me. But I guess the fucking wasn't good enough anyway. It's got maybe too much importance and what will happen when I meet a peer? A little mouse maybe 2 inches long is dodging from cover to cover making its way - where, in this kitchen, for a mouse to want to go? S/he gave me a little thrill. I have conventional attitudes to these animals that live with me, but I love them too, the beasties - here he comes back - flashing at four corners like a tiny cart. And into the bathroom - Won't stop loving you. That's a self punishment, but I can stop fucking you for sure. Leaving me where I was with Paul Kinsella except that I didn't like to feel him up, much. Kill cockroaches with my palm, only the ones that come near. Sometimes I spare one and wonder why, whether that cockroach has a special destiny that's just saved him. What Nellie has, I'm thinking, is just a lucidity and hardness that I haven't found in most women - her hardness and ease are what attracts? Her cleanness. Padi looked afraid of me. That was new - I said - my tenderness for Padi, it would be new to be able to express it lucidly. Padi sit still I want to embrace not embrace I want to caress the brown flat body, loose breasts, broad flat back, brown head where hair is like skin, sleek, and the same colour - another big nose woman - haughty but only out of spirit - build these fantasies on Padi, wishing to find her lovely and want her and win her, but not knowing at all whether she's anyone - at all. Judy-Lynn tells me Padi is hustling everyone just now. Baseball team - Sappho, Diane and Ano came to watch - Cathy pitching - Patrice catching - Judy, Jan, Marg in outfield, Chris, two more women I didn't know - The way the women are excited. Feel like Jane Austen investigating a very comic social concentrate - gossiping with Judy Lynn because I need the information - people gossip who do need information about how the society is set up - also using people to send information out about yourself. Had an idea about theatre with Susie [Susan Ksinan]. The bathroom being painted green, and the wood coming clean, and a Chinese lantern, pink and red! And today I bought a very beautiful little picture that was in a corner of a Chinese shop - two women doing something in a field - winnowing? They are so alike they could be the same woman from two angles and in two different moments of her posture - tall sturdy women - faces not visible - negative spaces very strong around them. [sketch] The skirt of the one who is slightly forward, overlaps the other figure. They seem to be standing in a moment of perfect harmony with each other. They are like two mountains. My mouse just whisked into the pantry closet and I hear chewing. It's the sunflower seeds. S/he threw itself out and around the corner. It occurred to me today to have a door in my new room opening onto a secret room - a trompe l'oeil of some kind, like a staircase - or? - changing exhibit - mirror - landscape. The women's legs, by their stance, are the strongest part of the picture. Sexy picture on account of it. Also the inner body feels the strength of the legs in their posture. Because the arms are raised something seems to be rising out of the legs, a lift, like something hydraulic, sap - a pressure - low angle - I can feel the lift right from their origin on the ground, which is drawn as a flat plane with a suggestion of immensity about it. - Susie's eyes strangely yellow and flat. I see the brown girl when I think of her, and this woman is tired around the eyes. A wonderful western light that came in after 3 days of rain. The last rain, hard, was like a rain of light. Padi is gone and sure enough Nellie is interested, wearing perfume again. When I held her and when I kissed her long goodnight I was all there, batting my breasts against hers soft and definite, holding her shoulders, holding her head - heating like an electric kettle, in a steady rise in pitch - oh, oh and breath deeper - wanting, all there - I am a will and she knew, too, what was necessary. "If you wanted me to stay would you ask me?" "Would I ask ..." - stalling - "I think my pride wouldn't let me." Goodnight she said and I went gasping to get my bed - touching my own breasts - there's no doubt I crave her bodily - crave and love - but how she bored me, talking - craving her bodily is more powerful or truthful, curiously, and so I do not hesitate to say she bores me. - Spent a day working badly - making holes in the new green plaster - preoccupied with sex - that's what it is? Wondering what the meaning is of the depth of that concentration. My body, when I approach yours ready to let myself out, like a kite, rippling outward but cautiously and with intense attention, does rise, and I like it rising, and when I yank it tumbling down I wonder what sort of exercise it was to rise and what kind it was to yank back. It has always been there, I have always been an erotic creature and have chosen my targets, moonshots, in various ways. When I'm alive I buzz and it's true I am radically horny now. That's what it is, I'd thought it was a peer group tizzy, but it is a lover I'm after. Recognizing it, what cunning steps can I take - Tonight at Queenie's I meet a woman called Martha who is a bush pilot, poetic of course. Martha, ticking down out of the sky in a silver seaplane - big dyke is she? She's just a little taller than I am, she's slight, oh alas she has breasts and shoulders like lovely Nellie, there she is in green corduroy baggy pants and yellow hiking boots, and a plaid shirt, she's 33 and has clean brown hair cut off at the shoulder, sometimes she wears it in a ponytail - she drinks sometimes, prowls on her comfortable boots - strong legs - can't see her face, she's sure to have a big nose and brown eyes, like the woman at the airport; she's like Angela too, thin wrists that make me feel uncertain of myself; she's a reader and of course she's a philosopher, she wears perfume the second time she sees me - we don't have to wait around, it is quick and scary - 'Tha, she has to be a farm girl but not from here - oh, she's English, it's certain, grew up in Wales damn it how will I not lose my head - no no I won't because she likes me - she puts her hair up and wears a soft brown sweater and a plaid skirt sometimes - I fly out with her - she doesn't cook well either but we do it for each other - she had a good boyhood and never loved men - has lived in Paris, is looking for land, learned to fly with a lover in France - she's away a lot, comes in and likes to go to music and movies, she paints 'a little' when she's in the north - I have to write her letters in Dawson - dear lovely 'Tha, in your hotel up there in the goldrush, no danger your being unfaithful, there are no dykes in Dawson, tell me what you do, long evenings, walking up and down looking at the unhappy Indians and teasing the teenagers, reading Dillard humorously in cafes, thinking of me and writing me letters that come twice a week sometimes - notice, but there in the post office -
I'm allowed to let go my arrow and it goes direct as if into space - and it never has to come down - - When I told Po about Martha she said, Show me your bush, that's what you meant, isn't it? Po doing a war/wrestling/courtship/bump dance with me that left us both in a fine steam. She with her eyes like blue stones, her mythological face. I invented her organizing a camel train, with an Arab headdress on. Telling us about her brief marriage. "He tried to put that thing in me. I packed up my schoolbooks in a suitcase." Grabbing firm hold of me to teach me the two-beat jiggle. "You're not used to following are you." Blank about Nellie. Nothing coming back. Nellie lying in the park crying - impatient person, Nellie I miss you - look at your profile attending to a story. - I'm so confused - where are you - where are we - we can still have that if we want? I am attached to you - I don't understand - I am stitched to you, I'm there for you - I am attached to you - I'm playing games to try to make you declare or feel enough so that I can welcome you back without danger to myself. -
- Necessary betrayals of mothers - Maggie on the telephone - her poem - her tenderness to me - and I because of my afternoon with Nellie, who at first was irritated, and then when I stuck with my dogged poised little declaration of availability, suddenly was there again - and let me kiss her with such hunger as would have frightened anyone before. I went through her like an airplane (line from Maggie), and both of us breathing like threshing machines, her girl face came back and I could feel mine, on my own face - lying with her, Luke coming and going from the corridor - sun outside. Your body makes me want you so much. Oh, what a relief. I'm so glad to hear that - Why are you glad to hear that? Because I want you so much. Did Ellie say that? We made love, and then we brought each other in a businesslike way and then Luke came in and she petted him while I fit myself along her back and resonantly sang hymns of praise - all creatures who on earth do dwell - it was a ringed moment, a completely satisfied peaceful humming moment. How incredible she said and I had a secret pleasure at hearing again her peaceful truthful unevasive Nellie. I went and got her. She agreed to come. How incredible. - Neighbourhood - rise of happiness when I look around this brick space and see benches, our expanded living room, little light green feathery trees, bobbing. Heat in the shelter of some small pines that make the blue sky behind them look like Portugal. Luke is lurking up on the dug hillside irritating me with little noises - a Chinese woman is green trousers crosses the square, her shopping bag creaking - a young man in plastic sports pants and a teeshirt that says 75 on it sat opposite and drank a Coke - a swallow crossed the square 4 inches from the pavement - man in warm jacket carrying a hard hat crosses along E. Georgia - bird chirps - at the entrance to this round square they have planted a grove, slight young trees that haven't much presence yet, but suggest a mass of a future - set up geometrically, four rows of four, staked - big leaves on light branches, hanging down loose - 2 more women (Chinese) with shopping bags - train blast ----- --- -- - a boy on an orange bicycle - transport truck motor on the other side, evoking the highway to the south - hammering at the renovation on the corner - blue spire on the Orthodox church - a telephone - regular hammer blows - the train again - a Chinese woman in pink pant suit, with shopping bags - crying children - a man greets her as she goes up Hawks Ave - children's voices - birds - quiet pink of an azalea bush - blue striped sheet on a line, with roses printed over stripes - Penelope and her gathered treasures! - blue and orange plastic over, I presume, a boat in a backyard - squeak of a clothesline hauled in - smart young Chinese woman in pink plaid - Woodwards bag, and her husband following after with 2 more Woodwards bags - white station wagon with a red canoe on it - slow black suit old man in straw hat - black dog - a line of clothes advances across a back yard, shirts and pyjamas - the sheets hang like huge flags or signals on a line higher up - sheets like rippling snow on account of their shadows - Hawks Grocery, 7-Up, boarded with plywood - a red box trailer nose tilted down at the curb - a Chinese woman and 2 girls - a cough - a white man in a brown felt hat, footsteps cracking on the grit - "Drawin' pictures?" - airplane - furry white clouds - they are in the north as usual - a girl approaching, skipping, with a branch of bamboo like a green torch making arcs in front of her - talking to her friend in Chinese - a boy on Hawks smacking a ball into a glove - the end house, there are 3, grey with cream corner boards, window frames, eaves, and red asphalt shingle roofs - one is checkered with grey and green on the porch roof only - all have chimneys near the peaks of the 4-sided roofs, like stems on apples - the end house has a grey-blue picket fence enclosing a yardful of long grass - I've dried my hair here - Luke has gone off - want to send a poem to the city telling them it is lovely here - a non-Chinese girl on a rattling bicycle, with a striped lolly - another non-Chinese girl with a striped lolly, pushing a rattling pushchair with a baby girl in it - a shadow of a vapour passing over the page - a cough - a selfconscious manly man with grey hair in rigid waves and a hand in his pocket - sound of wind - a car starting - the sheets nearly blown horizontal - Chinese man with a plaid jacket over another kind of plaid shirt - my hand's shadow with an intense Mach band around it - German shepherd lifting his leg over some iris - Chinese man in a jacket with a fur collar - crows - - Wende [Davis] here with her hair cut off beautifully, an inch long all over her head, and bristling, strong brush strongly sprung out of the scalp - she has a beautiful fervour on her face but her body is dumpy as if full of seepage, an urn - and her voice startles out of her too loud, nervously laughing, off balance - that is why Nellie is not attracted to her - that and the way she does not pay attention. Wende is largely absent, shines back my own absence to me. She could be got. How? Talking of Egypt. I felt myself lying, superficially, when I talk to her, in a way that is opposite of how I feel myself telling the truth with Nellie. - Gordon's film - his chant and rhythm, beating bells and rattles, drawing with a stick, caressing the water, caressing the sand - his foot, his hand, the shells, the water - a sliding superimposition, not afraid of its religiosity - I was proud of him. Gordon Kidd dir 1976 Olympus - A society based on sexuality vs Queenie's where the only thing people have in common is sexual queerness. Makes a more heterogeneous society! That's the comedy - Wende: no mirroring. She doesn't give back. Lack of skill? Doesn't like? Wende won't gossip? Is that why she won't talk about Nellie? - Traveling, as children. We have been to the island Mother came from, Father takes us across a swollen brown river, a flood river miles wide, toward the island that is the origin of the Epps. I scold him for taking us through such danger for his own reasons. We land, and go to look for lodging rooms. In a hotel, I question a woman who runs a gallery. We are on the island of Lesbos (which Nellie taught me to pronounce) (Lezvos); Madeleine is there, with Eugene, and has got a big advance from a publishing company. I want to ask for Nellie but the woman hurries away. On the other side of the island, I see the river's other branch miles down and try to understand how the river can have 2 such different levels. Father - river - island - hotel - chasm - old friends - makes me want to write a short dream story. When I think of it, it's my father's sexuality that wasn't right for me and hurt me - his hunger for feminine girls - Nellie's dad's liking and finding sexy the strong spirit. Wende talking about Egyptian women - cleaning pigeon cages with them, wearing what they wear - their tattoos. [top of page Orpheus and Euridice, Gluck] - Waking. Hallway unfurnitured, a paint tin, camera roams it, bits of wood, rags - radio music, but not nearby - child's legs appear, camera finds woman sleeping on the floor, she opens the sleeping bag and lies naked with the male child standing looking down at her - she has her legs open and strokes her belly - he passes into the next room and pees, the camera roams past him and back along to the woman who is putting on a white Indian shirt over her jeans - she turns on the radio - takes one of the plugs out of the wall socket and plugs in the kettle - unplugs the kettle and pours the water in the bathtub - c/u of cockroach swimming for the edge of the tub - puts more water in the kettle - finishes making coffee - the child appears dressed - turns the coffeepot nicely - puts on khaki jacket with large pockets - in the pockets puts a big notebook and a paperback - takes cup in one hand and coffee in the other - goes barefoot down the stairs, child trailing, clumps out in yellow clogs - down the alley carefully - down sidewalk to park - to seat in brick plaza - pours coffee - child appears with quart of milk and candy - he runs queer barefoot run - his face is dirty - he goes off again - she has book on her knee and scribbles - clogs off feet bare - it's hot - she has on crystal necklace - a young man with a newspaper sits on another bench after a time - look at children and men in suits going to church - another woman in cutoff shorts and a red teeshirt and sandals appears - the child is with her, and he's carrying a Tonka tanktruck - woman #1 gets up and goes to meet woman #2 and gives her a long hug while man with newspaper watches - woman #1 leaves - comes back carrying a tray with coffee pot, cups, toasted homemade bread - sets it on the brick, pours coffee - child says "Ellie would you like a squirt of milk?" and squirts milk into her coffee from the hose of the tank truck - - Bafflement and panic - earlier today too - Nellie here, I don't know what to say to her, there's a difficulty feeling real, I don't know where it's originating and she doesn't seem to feel it - it's a wierdness - a not-getting-through - my vigilant guiltiness assumes it is that I'm not interested in her as deeply as before, because the wrong was righted - I liked walking with her, smaller than me and with that smart corduroy jacket on, so I could put my arm around her shoulders - or attach her hand to my arm - something not coming through, that made me want her gone - as I did before when she had a secret - something unreal or unclear and something that turns away my passion into uncertainty - it is coming from her - things are not making sense, I didn't expect to see her because we had been weird this morning- - "I spent a lot of time with her." HA! I was right and it was her and it was Wende and I held right onto her through her panic of badness and I talked about wasn't she physically enthralled with me because of my leg and she talked about feeling it is because I do not come toward her physically - except for last week - she was brave after a while and said she loved me and I said that was like an eagle alighting in my stomach. The curious accuracy of my physical instincts about when she is holding back a thought - I get through to her - I have to work at her - she wants to be carried off and she's dared me to try my passion out on her - I went to sleep feeling calm and grateful but woke at 5:00 after a night of confronting my father, who was making eye contact? - with the first thought being that Nellie doesn't really feel me, because she is sleeping around and because she is holding it against me. She is trying to turn it and say that I don't have enough sexual push toward her, but it is seeming to me that she just isn't held - her imagination hasn't taken me in - by my body the way it grew on Paul and John Rowley, on account of my not taking them into my imagination. It occurs to me sometimes that Nellie is repeating Roy to me in a form that I can handle, and so above all I have to be minutely truthful and watchful. The thing she 'has' that I can have is a posture of reckless generosity. She's dishonest and evasive with me only on the issue of infidelities (asked me the meaning of the word) - talking the whole time about how up-front she is with her new acquaintances. - This social is seeming to be a fever. Telephone rings and it's Nellie and I don't want to talk to her and say so and hang up angry with her - and wanting to cry too. - Then there was a night when I was a sparking grindstone and succeeded in clearing her, while leaving myself more indifferent - her enjoyment has been making her vivid - Sheila and the [illegible]. The sander - my corridor - sleeping last night with polyurethane fumes making my muscles hurt - finished blond, clean floor, all one color, making a middle class apartment of my place - counteract with little devices like a poppy seed envelope glued onto a map of BC - in the pouch Nellie's only note and a pelican feather from Mexico. Our house is beginning to be beautiful - the blue in Luke's room. I never see cockroach corpses - do the other cockroaches come at night and take them? -
Dennis Wheeler dir 1975 Potlatch: a strict law bids us dance - Something fluent and happy with Nellie because we aren't protecting each other. I made a passionate speech about how if she didn't love me as much as I loved her that was a fine fate for both of us to have and that if she wants me to sleep with somebody else in order to prove I'm desirable I'll remind her that I've been passionately and recently enough loved so that I don't need to prove anything, and that before she feels guilty she should look at me and see if I am suffering damage or only having a time. I am a little retracted wondering if infidelity is the only challenge she's got for me - told her I was getting used to it. Feel proud of my recovery but I'm grateful she's so fair and real, otherwise I couldn't have done it. She's been an angel cake - tough and glistening, and impressionable. And talking to Wende - I feel I can take on these women and challenge them and play with them and it will suit them. An East Indian woman driving a bus! - Best and only not-ridiculous parts of Maggie's poem praising my body -
- On Hastings, in a café - an Indian woman called Randy, big stoned woman striding in little white pointed shoes - stumbling to kiss a baby - looking into her eyes - she's good looking - she's queening it with the little men making her meal - she's intelligent, that's visible, willful - she came in, there was a noisy fuss at the end of the counter where she is ordering and the two Chinese men are greeting her - she staggers next to us to ask for something - I make an instant connection with her eyes and say Hi - she asks Can I join you - or would you like to join me - moving to her high counter table - we join her, we can sit across from her - we don't realize it yet, but she's compelling us - she talks to Luke at first - I'm getting over thinking she's a drunk Indian and beginning to realize her power - SWEETHEART she shouts to the cook, throw me some matches - he brings them, smiling - she has a good face, fine features, must be young, she looks healthy - she must be 6' or gives that impression - What are you stoned on? I ask, looking across into her eyes to show I'm as tough as she is - If it was any of your business I'd have told you she said - no, first she said What makes you think I'm stoned - a retraction in the eyes - You're staggering a little - then she said it wasn't my business - I said there was no hostility in that, I just wondered if it was something I knew about - "I don't advertise" - the truth was I wanted to know about her, and I wanted to know how she was filtering - She's got big breasts and that roll of fat drinking Indians often have above the waistline - glasses - hair shagged off with an axe - a wonderful strong and pretty face - she has on a leather coat and is wearing an ugly teeshirt that says POOL TEAM on it - I don't like your hat she says - I like it, I like it a lot I say, what don't you like about it? - she won't say, doesn't know - I say, It looks like a man's hat, is that why? It is a man's hat - she smiles - I'm thinking she's a dyke certainly - and I'd like to ask her - You're so big you can say whatever you like, I say. You're bigger than everybody else. Are you bigger than me? she says looking into my eyes. I want to know where she comes from. Saskatchewan. Does she have younger brothers and sisters? She never knew them. Is she working? She's in the army. Who's she fighting? Blank. Rephrase: What's there to do in the army? She's a mechanic. Oh? She has long shapely oval fingernails, clean. Later she says she runs a hotel where I can stay for a month for nothing, pay later. Has six men working for her in North Van. Her fantasies so far are all masculine. I am fancying her, but when she asks to take us to a movie I say no. She's too big; and she's too stoned. Analysis - I'm full of last nights red pride movies and want to tell her it's alright now, she can go back to being an Indian, she can stop stoning and be as magnificent as she is, for a good reason - but there's nothing I can say without being patronizing. Aline the prison warden - and Myrna - the whole time N was with Aline she was not attracted to other people, "I wish I wasn't attracted to women like that, who are into being pretty" - a tall woman in a skirt and boots, hair in an afro, looks competent - her bourgeois flat in Coquitlam, her closetedness - then a twice-murderess powerful woman like 'Randy' who may even have been Myrna, captivates and mistreats her. The 'native people' and their repulsive presence in the streets - their ugliness, their drunkenness, their awkward malnourished bodies - in medieval cities were all bodies like that? - our bad conscience and our problem of conscience - because 'we' took 'their' land - the taking and the owning belonging to long ago generations whose only connection to us is racial similarity - race as another form of class, like gender - the inequality has to be expiated, without patronage however and hopefully without violence - 'they' have to do it themselves - work with Indian women? - without social work or missionary imposition. The Indians in our mythology - what can I do with film? That woman, who is psychopathic but not broken. She stares into the camera, opening shot - belligerent, drunk, a presence - I can't write the script because I don't know how to save her - can it be a personal film, with all the invention of collages, photos - the inventive process of this house-making. Go into the interior without money - for - Or do it with a poem. Journal of Suzanna Moodie I'm thinking of commitment to a place and time, poetry the location of dreams wishes lies in observation, geography, geology, history, the obvious and less obvious present life - Chinatown, the Interior, the Islands, the Mountains, the Indians, the Powerful, the Lesbians, the Children, the Neighbourhood. The complex favorite game - if, as Weil advises, we fix our longing for intimacy on the unknown All - what return messages do we get, that are not made within our own circle? Nellie - the She - sometimes understands me and sometimes not - her indifference, her attention, the processes we move though, minute estrangement and approach, confession, hurt, forgiveness, fright, courage. Is it like child's play, a practice for a later more adult life? Not that child's play is that.
When we'd lain down on Luke's boat to hold each other I felt her distance, but after a while decided to press in on her physically, to try to compel her. I made my hands large and pulled her head, I pressed her toward me - no caress any longer, a demand - I could take hold of her body, I could make it a size to handle, I could squeeze and roar into it, and I could tell by her breath that she liked my stubbornness and was contented. Little body loose around a skeleton, my little woman, my lively dear, my strong/soft/experienced [illegible, ink ran] real impact from and too. I said "I know something I don't think you know and it would be dangerous to tell you." "But you're going to tell me anyway, I can tell" she said. "It is that, in our perverse ways, both pretending not to, we are having a relationship." "You think I don't know that?" she says. I talk about her cooking and she talks about living together. - The joy I felt when she called me to lunch and there was hot cooked food in front of me! Told her how my loneliness made me speedy in the bed building and she said she could tell - by the split wood, crooked nails - sensed that as soon as she came in. Breakfast at Breadline
Looking backwards - war and peace report on phase I and phase II of my connection with Nellie. "I am attached to you." Her eyes hold me still while she sticks it into my belly but I squirm just out of line, "Is Nellie really saying that?" "Touché." In phase I I was protecting Nellie and opening a trust - in phase II I am not protecting Nellie and our conversations have got much more exciting; and she is learning to trust me - - Journey tomorrow, am thrilled and have done my various symbolism of baking and cleaning, and something new to wear - talked to Wende about the area between Pemberton and Lillooet. It seemed that what I am looking for there is the abandoned hotel or motel on the old highway - the women's retreat. Wende's tales of being ranch cook at the Diamond S. Journey. Journey. Nellie. Adulthood. Sacred objects: green cord jeans, white shirt, cookies, rooms, squash coming out of the oven wax-skinned and whole like a totem animal. Could other vegetables be prepared whole - potatoes. Experimental cookery - fish principle. - [quick trip intervenes] [ Nellie on my mom's couch] The journey. The number of days. Tuesday. Want to think of each one. Tuesday. The boy sleeping in the back seat, the avid boy. Wednesday. The farm, the Peace River Country, the road I first drove, the Hilltop Lake. Thursday. Hot and clouds, south to Heart Lake, green water and raft. Friday. Mountain and then miles of rain and stories, and not finding the campsite and sleeping in the community hall, and Saturday Quesnel to the wonderful high country of the Old Cariboo Road, Pavilion's new-painted church, Lillooet, and at 10-11 miles, the camp next to flooded Cayoosh Creek, roaring creek, circle of trees around our bed. Today slowly and in silence through the last of the logging road, in sun. Duffy Lake.
Coleridge - Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. Speech - a list of forbidden phrases The fond and unmixed love and admiration which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth - Workbook - Looking at old poems - suddenly unattached to half of them, which seem sentimental, girlish, and icky in their style. Am I suddenly more 'mature'? Passion and dry clarity. The goodbye poem seems closer to it. The still lifes are better too. Studio crisis: Madeleine [Duff] wants help setting up a film show at the studio, in which we show BC filmmakers - Al! Gordon! Rick! "Just to make money." She says she and Shelley struggle every month to find the money. We should just give our notice to Fred otherwise. Support from and for women in this town tends to mean lesbian - who to ask for a little funding quick. Money is being looked after by a woman who cherishes her connections with men and may like to use the studio to support herself in that - is there a collective job we could do? Madeleine is owed $30, Shelley $40, there is a scramble every month for the odd $50 - a floating fund of that much. Called Maggie, she'd just spoken to Madeleine, who wanted support - after that she'd spoken to Phyllis, because she needed support - she said my objection was "just your man-hate coming out" - I hurried and called Judy Lynn, who supported me! Called Judith and then Ardèle, who were useful - Ardèle telling me about Seattle and Bellingham women. Called Nellie who laughed a lot and said "Good luck!" Madeleine's tact, offering to show mine, actually buttering me up. Wants to flatter her male friends by showing them. Rain on the two transplanted trees, good. Karen's fine drumming on the guitar like a rain. - HD on scribes "the keeping track of the treasures which contain for every scribe which is instructed, things new and old." - Beauty of Karen and Lilith aligned across the table. Paul Epp coming up, the house on Metcalfe. [One of the women downstairs had known my brother at Sheridan College.] Candy's house seen through the front windows, a gaslit little drawing room with a breeze through the transom. - [Women's] films available
- Wonder how many of those six women went home and wrote in their journals, Marjorie, small and today she was bright and quiet; Jean [Mallinson], denim and Indian cotton, blue eyeshadow on, being pretty and her hair blonded, but her face stumbling with pain, secret knowledge of betrayal, yes it has marked her; Wende, laughing her braying nervous laugh (Nellie, where are you?) reading the story of how when she started out simply to get rid of her virginity she ended up engaged; Jan with her grey rigid face and elegant brown hands and feet, saying How do you read when you heart's pounding; Maggie, the eccentric she is, in weird faded blue summer denims and sneakers and socks and woolly legs sitting knees wide apart and hair pretty around her face, putting her mouth out like a crooked megaphone to speak her poems, she found her voice, as she says. These days there are nectarines in the stores, and they're good. Jean's divorce poems, all raw; her damage, her happiness in what she reads and thinks, she's a loving curious woman losing her slavery, I feel like her mother and I feel her give way to me. Charlotte Mew, Joanna Field, her secret women that comfort her as they do me. I'm a striding woman in this khaki jacket with my limping silver boots and crowbar balanced on my shoulder, ego and not-ego. Wish Wende would smarten up, she bores me acting like a psychic invalid. I don't believe it. Dreams full of Judy - Father shouted her out of the house and I took care of her - swimming with speedy grace in speedboat circles, lying on my back kicking butterfly feet - Lucy, suddenly slim pulling on rollerskates and moving brilliant on the neighbourhood asphalt and into tunnels, doing a cartwheel. - Nellie - arriving at her house and measuring my wildness against our old adjustments, couldn't look at her out of shyness and lecturousness - she was delighted by some shine my loneliness had given me, a loosened life in my face and heat in my body - there was a passage in our love-making where she had been licking me and I moved so I could be next to her head, and she had 2 fingers inside me and fucked me so rarely we were all inside out to each other pure lamb-peacefulness hum hum hum - when I touched her I couldn't compete with her ease and inspiration and I felt sorry for that, but when she came I held my hand on her labia to feel the tick tick of the convulsions. Then we were both transformed into clear glass our best possible simplest most delighted selves and we shone at each other in such an intensity of childish joy I didn't know what to do with it - this human duet - I said, Now we have to get married, because it has to stop - by which I guess I mean we biologically need to turn into somebody else, it is the moment of escaping or transforming, but instead of course we touch the base and go up to bat again. When we were lying on the hallway carpet in and on all sorts of quilts, last night, trouble and drama broke out downstairs - Lilith in new guises, two of them - one the blackmailing hysteria of pretend suicides, the other a good hard bitchy fuck-you secure anger. We were alarmed; remembered our own battles; called the next moves; laughed; and hoped for peace. This morning it's continuing. The point about Nellie yesterday was the way she met me - it was Nellie as promised by the hockey player's goodnight kiss. Attention and aggression in perfect equilibrium. More research - I am extremely curious about how Nellie goes from woman to man and back - when she sat on her bed naked except for her little black dressing gown, she was all girl - I'm trying to remember whether a man at those moments is a girl too - specifically, Tony - don't think a man ever met me that way - no, there was never a man who could hold the delight as Nellie does - Andy trying to return the glance - then Nellie puts on shirt, vest, pants, jacket and her face goes severe, she's a close-shaven but weathered man, hands in pockets, wearing a ----? expression - self-enclosed. What kind of man does she look like, not a professional man, a man turned inward, standing with his hands in his pockets looking out to sea, frowning a little, but - maybe that's why she looks like a man - safe in his body, which is not threatened. Body and face both become mannish - she puts it on, with her clothes. It is hard to remember the body she has underneath her clothes, thoroughly covered and invulnerable. I imagined her differently dressed, to preserve the girl, put her into a halter dress and sandals, but her legs would rebel. When she was girl, she sat with her legs folded to one side, as a small graceful body can do, toes pointed. She told me a painful story of going to try out for a young girl's baseball team. "The manager told me I had to go home, because he thought I was a boy. I just went home, I couldn't tell him I was a girl." She told the story when I'd complained that my experience with men, having wasted all that time, had put me years behind her, to say that her clear lesbianism had been hard for her too. Candy throwing her head sideways. It's a gesture made by yoked animals. Gordon at the Pelletier benefit, hair parted at the centre, wearing white; shy body. The shabby and unhappy collection of "unemployed reds' and native people at the Fishermen's Hall. I and Candy and Nellie and later Judy Lynn dancing, as four, all smiles. Candy rubbery-legg'd and inspired, saying to me "You sure can dance" - what nicer thing could she have said - it inspired me to dance better - also said I had more jaw than before, was I thinner? So she's looking. Thinking about my community. Hidden intelligence being called out - Jean, Nellie - she was so smart when I was crazy! She liked it. Karen and Lillith, Candy.
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