| dames rocket 3 part 4 - july 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1. A month ago when I sat on Kits Beach, hair on end, Nellie at soccer with Luke, two women passed both alike in short hair dark skin dressed alike too. I stared at them because they were intelligent European lesbians in the uniform of. "You were reading a newspaper and eating yogourt." "And you were with a woman who looked like you - it was a book, not a newspaper, and I was eating cherries out of a bag." I telephoned Cheryl because Mo said she had films she was reluctant to show. I didn't call anyone else on my list. I called her again to tell her the show was on. She said she'd be there. I was at Judy Lynn's party and today roofing in the sun. Forgot. Arrive at the party. Phyllis said "This is Cheryl, who was looking for you." I saw again the woman who sat on the floor talking to Karen. Darkness and a black-eyed ... "Oh" I said. "Oh." "Yes" she said. Went to talk to her and Karen and began to notice the care of her phrases. "Do you work with mushrooms?" "Do you ever have a dream where you're walking down a corridor through a lot of familiar rooms, and then you open a door ---?" I don't say anything, I dive behind the armchair, jump up and look into her eyes smiling, duck down, jump up, flash flash blue light - oh I love you because - oh is it possible - oh - oh -. "I've had that dream at least two times a year for twelve years." You're making my hair stand on end. Comfort, instant comfort, because she's there and speaking my careful language. Wanted to sit near her, joy and relief. Barbara Grieg's beautiful smiles last night. She saw the swimmer cross. So did Colleen? So did I. The second reflection - a person crossing? A 'study of.' She was wearing a jean jacket and little work boots. Her profile had Nero in it. Something overly protected in her too. Dreamed about a dog - Want to imagine how to be myself. She seemed to give me a style in relation to her from the first time I talked to her. A comfortable excitement. When I had ducked behind the chair it pleased me that this expression was happening so freely and exactly. - Roofing - Karen's pleasure when it fit nicely and looked like a good job. Candy and K and I having breakfast in the sunny kitchen, coffee and muffins. Sun on the roof, frustrations with wood, patching from alley, sitting on the roof talking about the Oregon Women's Land Trust, excited about wasted talent. The green well of the garden below. Our mutual thoughts - think - think - smoothly working out problems - proudly telling a woman at the busstop what we're doing. Dyke relations - free excitement in relation to friends, as in young girls. Padi - brown shine she has in her orange shirt. Lou - here and talking about land. And oh twitchy cuddly Candy, the SS Beaver adventures over the fence, old treasures, my beautiful bench [Candy and I break into a retired ferry docked at the old Main Street wharf, and I take home a wooden bench]- most of all the magnetic purr coming off Candy's big soft body. When we went home she was asleep on the couch, little fat hands and a cat asleep inside them, her head twisted around and back, an artery banging in her stretched neck. Lou, Karen and I came to touch her while she slept. It was compelling. Jane Perks in my dream last night, I met her on a journey. She told me she liked the way I stubbornly give her my friendly courtship in spite of the fact that she doesn't reciprocate. Told a little of the dream. Judy Ritter pale and tired in her mechanic's overall doing tune-ups with two women from California. Debbie #1, beautiful blue-eyed woman like a courtly prince. Debbie #2 sullen blond biker in drag as a high school boy. She seems to lurk inside herself though. Karen in glasses sharp and authoritative. Another Judy. Ann. Janet. Don. Wanting to touch people. If I let out the stroker she might be ravenous. She's being let out. Little freedoms. It's Sufi farmtime, taking freedoms, learning FAST! - 2. Cheryl and her friend (?) and the deformed man Don making me feel the country hick - Cheryl herself dressed in an Indian cotton shirt (blue) and wearing silver at her neck - yoga book open on the floor - apartment very clean - I saw her man for a second, profile, when she bent over the Uher - a brown fatface beaknose man like Manuel, a eunuch man - Technology of the sacred in the toilet. When I saw the two women at the beach they both looked like Cheryl. Awful cheap girly name, Cheryl - they outnumbered me, with their old acquaintance - I couldn't follow what was happening - yet when I looked at her I was ready to study, and love, her - and had already seen enough to give me an image - I'm angry with her for not seeing me alone - was she afraid to? - was it accidental? Fantasies. In my dreams some of the dissatisfaction was resolved - C spoke to me personally, and she asked me to come back for the night. I swung by a rope, from the ceiling, she laughed below me. Abrasive evening, the way those people would not support what I said, especially Don and ? They would fall silent and stay silent. When I went out of the room they would explode into talk and laughter. Even C, when I asked her who the other two women of the four were, said "I don't have their names." We sat silent as if we all know she'd stuck out her tongue at me. Such a hostility in them. Skinned alive, by the time I left. With Cheryl, moments when she would look over with her flushed healthy face - when I left a look of appeal? Or apology? They were telling me it is in vain to try to make a community. Is there an objective way to describe what happened? I went there tired, but armed with my face, which I was liking and felt represented me - excited by hope of strenuous, real, personal meeting with a kindred woman whose bearing had already made me interested in her body - ran into her decorated as if for a seduction, but protected by the analytic superficiality of her friend - didn't like her friend and resented her being there, liked Don even less - and they didn't like me, and I felt what a protected environment the women's community really is - the Parisian woman at the conference in London, who said what she felt as no Parisians do, in public - [Later stoned note in different ink: Who is this - Peter, George Elliot, self improvement books. Who think we choose a style but every style is a voice is a mind.] - Like all power seekers short-sighted. There was a trivial abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument. It was simplicity and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light. The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end ... And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid. Ursula Le Guin 1974 The dispossessed Harper & Row [Later note: She is writing about herself writing the book.] - Remembering how the Internationale made me cry at the People's 4th of July [in Seattle]. Her authority. Like Lessing and Richardson she's able to assume that the female mind is more evolved than the male. - Book - how close I read it, feeling when she's galloping, when she's tired. How the book confirms me. The hero, once again. Physically distinguished, radiant, marked from infancy, wedded in holy wedding to his equal partner - but a dimensional man - he, it, sends me to the land where I remember Carmichael. Her comfortable style. Near the end, you feel the beginning, and how it was opened to you. Being made love to sometimes, often when masturbating, my mind looks for something to do, somewhere to go, like a clumsy extra trying to help. In truth my body warms and releases better if it can go somewhere else and I think of errands to send it on - chanting, concentrating on pushing down, concentrating on releasing, looking around for a fantasy. Le Guin's sex is so ideal, makes me inadequate where other parts make me inflamed with pride. Big humanistic writing with huge perspective. Science fiction - writing that allows writers to think outside the social mode. Very precise sense of words - "the sheer brief path of the assassins." Visual presence - "all this suddenly rushed dazzling down the screen." About time. About social/individual and various ways of seeing it He's made an intelligent clown - "I am the Beggarman, you see." Not about feminism, but 'correct' - in her intimacies, she's an old style woman - their marriage is sheer wish fulfillment. She writes in my cadence. - [undated letter to my mom] Hello Mary, a quick letter while the bread is baking. It is Friday night and Mozart, dark outside, Luke asleep, the bread smells good and tomorrow will be a beach day. Your news is certainly exciting, a real project with real children whose souls aren't televisioned yet. I'm happy for you. Thank you for the twenty dollars, it was help. This is a scrappy letter I'm afraid. I am a little preoccupied by the letter I've written Ed. When Luke came back he eventually told me about Ed spanking him, which appalled me, because I had trusted him to have learned something from the way his behaviour alienated his own children, and I had thought he valued his second chance. But I guess he hasn't changed and I don't see how I can send Luke to the farm again. I think there is such an unconscious rage in Ed that he can't control it even now. And I do resent the fact too that even now you are too afraid of him to stop him, although I know you try, and I'm sorry to think of putting you back in that old role of protecting children from his mean streak. Maybe you should have told me more explicitly what the situation was like for you? My letter to Ed was very harsh, and I hope you don't end up taking the brunt of it. I tried rewriting it to soften it a little, but I have sent the first draft simply because it was true. I do curse Ed for his brutality, and I do refuse to loan him Luke again, although it seems a tragedy for Luke not to be able to stay in connection with the farm. I'll have to find him another farm. But of course I mourn my own exile from the farm too, it is so beautiful and so much a part of me. Nellie and I had a lovely evening in the neighbourhood, we went to Grandpa Epp's place, picked some rhubarb and some rubbish-treasure, looked at the creek; and we went to the East Place too, and poked about, and as I went through the field where the lane used to be I shouted Hello it's me, I'm back! and made Nellie laugh. It was a magic evening as you'll remember; we did go up to Hilltop and camp with the tent and a fire, and the first corner of the steaks which lasted us until we got back to Vancouver on Sunday. And the buns, and the rhubarb. Sat and looked at blackbirds in the morning. It was lovely there, that litte round eye of a lake. In the morning I drove all the way through Dawson Creek, my first time driving in a town (and before that on a highway, although there was no traffic); both Nellie and I were exhausted by the time I'd missed the turn-off on the other side of town, and so she drove until we got to Heart Lake (do you know it?) where we camped and mountain-climbed and swam for a day. And ate steaks. The next day it rained, I drove until I couldn't take the tension anymore, and then she drove and we told each other all our old travels. In the rain that night we slept in a community hall near Quesnel. Next day we took wonderful back roads from Clinton through the Diamond S ranchland, and then from Lillouet we took a forestry road that cuts through a little creek pass to Pemberton - a little gravelroad that sneaks up on the Garibaldi Range from behind: we camped near that road Saturday night and on Sunday, in the sun again, drove the rest of the way at 20 mph enmarvelled by the silence and privacy of the little road. From Pemberton to Vancouver is sheer four-lane and didn't count. Oo - very solid healthy bread, a little subtle? Not enough salt I mean. But it melts butter nicely. M, did you want to talk at all about why you were so uncomfortable here? Besides the physical inconvenience of renovation and not having a bed or bath. Sometimes it occurs to me that you seem to be a little afraid of me, you seem to treat me a bit the way you treat Ed; am I imagining things? Or does my 'push' make you feel pushed? I think it was a mistake to take you to the coffee house, and wish you had met people more one-by-one. I think you got the impression that I have joined a bunch of freaks (not that you would ever put it that way), and so I have in a way. But ordinary people - well I like that group of freaks although I have nothing in common with most of them, beyond my own eccentricity; those people interest me because they are experimenting with trying to make a community out of each other, and they sometimes succeed. Maybe I'm drawn to hungry people because the unhungry ones are such a labour to get through to. Or maybe I have just enough good friends so that I can enjoy people who don't inspire me, just for their human spectacle. But don't worry, I don't drink or dope or lose myself except sometimes in coffee and reading. Did you want to say any more, or ask any more, about my lesbianism? I think it must have bothered you more than you let on. I had a good talk with Roseanne about it and she said you were a little worried. Can you talk to Heide or someone like that? Have you liked the Ms magazines? And Centering? I did call Roseanne immediately but it was too late by days. This morning I had an interview at the National Film Board. I took them my film and they paid it good attention and said nice things but whether they are interested in my next project I won't know till next week. It was scary and fun. To face the gentlemen of the Structure. Please tell me all about how Judie is and seems. Is she healthier? Did she get my letter? That's all fer now - - Want to note down yesterday evening, Nellie in a long blue dress, her shaggy head above it with that androgynous hewn look - I had her blanket around my shoulders and put it around hers too when we sat on a log, she talked about Thea and I talked about the evening I got skinned - we were lucid together. It is happening that we talk really well - she asks me when she doesn't understand something, but she isn't afraid any more. She spoke of her new house - says it makes her afraid because it seems a sign that she's settling into living alone - but is hungry for someone else - I talked to her about why it isn't possible to have that real desire - because it is symbolic and real living together is not its reply - we walked home hips bumping, my arm around her shoulders and the blanket with it - but when we went to bed - Luke bedded in the next room - their hilarity in the shower together! oh she's Luke's real friend - we talked about faces. I told her which of hers I liked and didn't like and asked her to tell me some of mine - she said the one she liked was when I'm attending to something and my face says don't disturb - says when I'm excited there's a strain around my eyes that looks like fright - it's a face that scares her, what did she say, in some ways you're a wild woman. I had a sense of my own physical eccentricities, the hardening of the body, with age, into tics and deformities - like Maggie's megaphone mouth and Mother's grimaces - it frightened me to think that my face which I've thought of as projecting what I like about myself, is constantly betraying the inner deformities I hardly know I have - more than frightened, it paralyzed me. Nellie was all close wrapped-together kissy love and I could just lie with her assenting but I was paralyzed and even when we suddenly woke, still enlaced, passionately but inaccurately fucking, I could not originate a touch toward her, I could only cling in a pain of absence, while she briskly licked me - but so far away, down there. I was feeling sex like a pain but it was sending me almost into a coma so I went down and got her and lay enwrapped with her until near morning. Luke came and lay down between us, and wriggled. She came back and made us breakfast after her first walk - came in wet. Luke so happy yesterday, singing in his silvery vibrato. He hasn't got the tunes exactly right yet but the quality of his voice is wonderful. Getting him from the airport, in the clothes I'd come from Seattle in, still part of that journey - the brown hat, green cord and army jacket, white Indian shirt and a big fragrant maroon rose in the breast pocket buttonhole, I felt a commanding stranger, a live mother - then found The dispossessed in the arrivals hall, exactly the right book for the day - and Luke came up behind me. When I showed ID they believed me. A thrilling impulse of truth-telling - Nellie's gift to me as Paul's was cadence and measure - Margaret's, derision. - 3. Cheryl on the telephone, her voice quaking as mine did when I replied to her. Oblique, generalizing. Distance of intellection, categorization. I want to tell her house - I asked it first, betraying myself - and garden - was ashamed to ask her the key - felt how unsimply and qualifiedly I offered her the game - she objected, she objected uniquely, saying she had to know more conditions, what limits - I told her I could make no decisions, she had been left at the border - so she said she'd tell me friends' houses, and described them in generalizations, what they all have in common, sense of willful distance - she seems perverse, in a wonderful perversion, I want to turn her loose among simple people and give her a rest, but she doesn't rest - what did we do, we concentrated on passing words back and forth, and it was a good match and as soon as she got bored she went home - she does not share, she lectures (which I do too), she posits. It is mutual exploration but she is so controlled and stays so far from the felt instant (though she hounds the thought instant). I'm reflected by her as a warmblooded gregarious person - she asked if I was and I told her what I understand about learning not to be afraid, bringing the private voice into public, throwing it away. In her theoreticalness she is like Roy or - I think of him with her - Richard [Berman], the unbody people who, like science fiction, physicists and seducers, find the world unstable and try to hold it still, not Colette, but RD Laing. A man-mind, in a flat tweed cap tonight, asserting her sensitivity to people who enter her in buses. But not telling stories. Refining, refusing, staccato. Her body says stay off. When I said erotic she heard erratic. She is attracted to my looseness as to a sore tooth in her own mouth. Everything I say she turns into a generality. When she said the garden, was the only time she told me about a real thing - named actual weeds, surprised me she knew their names - chickweed, borage. (Also Zoë studied Basho.) She did coke and then lit two joints - so puritanical but. Morality - finding the best way to live. - novel = 'a research' Russ: "sick with love. The worst thing (said Janet) is the intense familiarity, the sleepwalker's conviction of having blundered into an eruption of one's own inner life." It seemed to me that we were the victims of the same catastrophe and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or under a bush, to talk it over. Whileawayans do not like the selfconsequence that comes with romantic passion and we are very mean and mocking about it; so Vittoria and I walked back separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before we'd be over it. This lady with her fluency that has been arriving in my blue pages. Joanna Russ 1975 The female man Bantam
I described my archangels, who surround me. (Moralistic. My Dickens characters. I can wear that number of masks.) She says no one confirms her, she makes herself up, if she names her sources it is too much like saying who she wants to be seen as. Do you resemble no one? Not me, not me, not me. An old mode of mine. A possibility I turned away from, but in its developed state interesting to me. The foreignness her mode gives my tales of bars and old dykes and young blacks - only artists are her friends she says. We have a philosophical difference. Is she asking me whether I'd be faithful? "You're very interested in the house and yet you are itinerant too," she said, "it is interesting that both are so developed in you." What will bloom? Exclusivity. Willed aristocracy. Fastidiousness. Real aristocracy is not willed, although it is willful. You are really pompous sometimes. Didactic. Self important. Ego important. Hungry. Fierce. Female. Are you? To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person. - Ego: instrument. For what? In childhood we are convinced that we are x, named, ourselves. Self loosens, with sensory accuracy? X is all important, our existence, in childhood. Luke is Luke, I was little Ellie. Maybe that is why I'm in love when I am, with the childhood of whatever friend - the grownup knows self is an instrument and wants to do good work with it, but is discouraged from remembering that it is only a tool. Keep it fluid! Eccentricity of fluidity, like the child, but not an eccentricity of hardened flesh, erosion, damage. (Jean wrote about her hand as a deformed thing - I was writing about Nellie's deformity - the canny and conscious extremities, tough mercenaries of the navel, eroded like headlands.) Maggie is thin and wrote a poem about people with rocks in them - dirigibles sensitive to color - yellow - she is writing more cleanly and originally than anyone - she is appearing in public, giving her privacy out, she is growing fast, and I notice her, but repress - seems she's forgotten, once more, about how she's never going to speak to me again. Smell of my own sweat, doing without deodorant, dominant sensory experience these days. 19 pushups without trouble. - Science fiction women - Write a science fiction piece - on what - if that could be developed - science fiction is a form of perspective, research - the way the opening of The female man gives an immediate coherent world. Style - collage - information - how it is given, does it matter if it is strung together - how does she play with our expectations - Jeannine - cat and tree - identification - Esoteric language - le savete - The function of not explaining anything - insecurity - the "I" that comes and goes surfacing in different people. It reads better second time than Dispossessed does. Key paragraph explaining probability strands, parallel universes - #1 deduction - this is a book being put together by a writer, who brings forward the machinery - She too has an excellent eye and throws pepper over her descriptions, in handfuls, to disguise them - - Portable Jung Inner division - "side by side with the series of ego-contents a second series of equal intensity comes into being ... might call it another, second ego." The serious problems of life, however, are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is surely a sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seems to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. the struggle of the child for an ego (Help her, then.) Why must each ego live through all its possibilities? primordial images something like psychic organs Defines intuition "perception of the possibilities inherent in a situation" I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel. psychological phenomenon that lies at the root of magic by analogy dangerous situations arouse affect-laden fantasies ... give rise to archetypes Makes connection with Plato Holy Ghost in early times thought of as feminine. - What is collective and physical perhaps is just the charm we give certain concepts when we meet them. uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension Personal unconscious - has complexes - impersonal has archetypes literally a pre-existent form The motif of the dual mother - c/f Nathalie Granger constellated archetypes The dream is, properly speaking, a highly objective natural product of the psyche. Assumes a psychic equilibrium toward which the psyche strives - feels repressions as a sense of moral inferiority A person is a philosopher of genius only when s/he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. Collective feeling and thinking and collective effort are far less of a strain than individual functioning and effort; hence there is always a great temptation ... its leveling down and eventual dissolution into the collective psyche occasions a loss of soul in the individual, because an important achievement has been either neglected or allowed to slip into regression. C/f Cheryl's ferocity, my guilty doubt - Individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity. Vs suggestibility, mental contagion = collective. Persona = "arbitrary segment of collective psyche", a sum of psychic facts that are felt to be personal - "pertaining exclusively to this particular person" - "all those contents that refuse to fit into this particular whole are either overlooked or repressed ... ideal image to which one tries to mold oneself. Only a mask of the collective psyche that feigns individuality ... it is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a person should appear to be." Individuation (as opposed to individualism) means precisely the better fulfillment of the collective qualities of the human being ... individuality is the unique combination or gradual differentiation of functions and faculties which in themselves are universal ... divest oneself of the false person and at the same time of the power of the primordial images. Widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes and ambitions which always has to be compensated or corrected by unconscious tendencies ... instead, relationship to the world of objects no longer egotistic ... wish-conflicts, but collective problems requiring collective solution. Ego = point of reference for the field of consciousness. Questionable whether it is the center of personality. The shadow: inferiorities. Projection - the cause of the emotion appears to lie w/o a doubt in the other person. Effect of the projection is to isolate the subject, change the world into replica of one's own unknown face. Shadow is always of the same sex as the subject. Speaking of relationships with parents "an unconscious tie (which need not by any means express itself consciously as love)" - "children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents." My mother's unconsciousness of anger and protest; my father's unconsciousness of tenderness. the childish gestures of lovers Marriages based on instinct and assumption that the other is the same. Analysis of container and contained - the more the contained clings, the more the container feels shut out of the relationship. Analyses it in terms of complexity, the more complex is unsatisfied in her/his need to be unified - says the way through is for the container and the contained each to complete themselves in themselves. Where can one find people, among present day Europeans, not deformed by acts of moral violence? Introverts protect themselves from objects, including people. Extroverts expend like a prolific organism with a short life. The object controls. "Hallmark of classical hysteria is an exaggerated rapport with persons in the immediate environment," imitation, tries to be interesting, suggestibility, effusiveness - Roy called me hysterical - reaction of unconscious to fantasy, egocentricity, "essentially primitive, infantile," ruthless and brutal. - In grief again - think - cry? Can't, only nearly. Think? Haven't felt a sexual openness to Nellie since grief over Padi - since the dark rainy night in the car when she turned herself off because I was driving into her - last week she was in love with me, I was indifferent, no I was pleased but kept back a little resentful reserve, which said this is lovely for you but you aren't getting through to me - this week she's 'got it on with' Laurine on Sunday night (and?) and has pulled back (oh the panic when I came in and sensed it! - the same feeling, discomfort that makes the room too small, I just want to get away from her - something's wrong? - is it me, feeble paranoia? no it never is - when I feel it - I grabbed it by saying "Why am I feeling so uncomfortable" - and then understood it and stopped accusing myself). Anyway I haven't been enchanted by Nellie since I was going to say the night in the car but it really was the last time at her house - we are losing our connection and we're both sad - buses, I said - I'm on the bus that pulled out five minutes before yours came in. Something icky. Something hard. Something angry. Fight. Logjam. Unforgiven rejections. Your voice goes phony. You've been fat and that's put me off. We don't have much to say. You only want to make love to me, you don't want my drive. I'm angry last week you had it all to yourself and didn't realize I wasn't in it. (Didn't pull things out of me.) Endless householding - boredom of novels and escape, and Chinese buns - what is it? - restlessness, inability to finish the rooms - rebellion - horniness doubtless and pushed down; unconnection mediocrity - unsolved lifestyle, want things to be harder, but where? - envy of other people's clear sex - oh, if a woman would put on a flimsy skirt for me! what an avalanche it set off, the Little Locksmith indeed. I am lonely. I'm plagued by Luke and the household fuss around him, but yes that's it I'm lonely - not in the clear desperate bright energized way, as when Luke wasn't there, but dimly absentmindedly falsesteppingly growing oldly - before periodly - trappedly. - Olson and that lot political too, in reaction to A poem is energy transferred Valéry "Lyric is that mode of poetry in which content and form cannot precede one another." If their project is to experience something without abstraction why are they failing? Is it a very masculine project? Or urban? - Mar-tha, come to me now, we half people beg you to bring us a whole pattern, my way is not clear, I don't know what to do, joints open (Miriam Xios exists, at the Strathcona library, where children circulate their own books! I was caught by a joy at that). The Little Locksmith and Jean Mallinson fermenting in me, I wonder who is the soft in Cheryl, that posits such a hard, as a blind. You protest too much - Katherine Butler Hathaway 1943 The little locksmith: a memoir Coward-McCann Alright, Cheryl: Nellie shows me how I send into the imagination what she simply and directly takes to bed - shall I take you less into fantasy and more into bed - doesn't seem possible and anyway I'm not sure you fancy me - can I sell you on my fluency, perfume -
(Nellie - with you fantasy comes in later, it is just a question of where you slot it before or after fucking.) I'm very much moved by you, not the way two bodies lean slowly toward each other, your body so erect says You come get me - Ambivalence yes - mystery yes - confession too - - Martha - chance and necessity, find you by chance or not at all, Martha, waiting - slim secret body, Angela, a body I could wish to - unite with - talk, oh talk - she talked about angels - she had her daughter with her, adopted, her lover's child, a girl of six, a blackeyed Chinese girl good at math - the Whileaway. She clicks down and ties her silver plane to a wharf, she doesn't expect me, but looks for me, and I'm there shyly in the white shirt and crystals. Olson - culture is confidence. Olson on Mexico.
- 4. Come home from Cheryl's house feeling I've already outgrown: feminism, 'strong women', the Co-op, novels, eros (but no), the community, money, personal emotion. She's the antithesis moving in fast and I like it, a different version of human: and yet, excavating anger, she pronounces, and I know I have always - before - at root been delight and risk. She selfsharpening sickle scorns.
And why on account of this, stoned, did I have such a strong physical pull toward her I weighted myself in my chair to keep from embracing her. Physical light. It came out like a thought, I never decided to say it. "I'm afraid to get more stoned than I am because if I do I'll jump on you." "You're a funny kid. What will you do when you've jumped on me." "I don't know." "What will I do." "You'll scream and run away." Oh have I let that out I thought. Will not flirt directly but is often right there. Hmmm. Means. Want to find a way to get more comfortable and silly. Vision of the witch. I'm mirrored as libido. Meat vs knife. Delight of speaking the foreign language with Zoë. The musical catharsis of Zoë's angry crying, fading to sobs, gasps, winding down. What is it, that I want to get closer. The face. Slide her out of her pompous lecturing self defining mode. There's a joker I didn't see before. Quicker, closer to the quick. Yellowgrey sea, warm and resistant - Slowly, desire What is desire for? ("We've slept together for so many years, that helps.") Nellie this morning, we hesitating and then she reluctantly making love to me and then when I had sent my flame thrower directed through the top of my head for a long while we with our hands on each other lying with our faces together fly outward with joy, who could renounce the pleasure - and Laurine and I embracing one another in my dream, and Nellie and Laurine embracing now - but the way I resist the stone, the way I've resisted fucking - if I let myself, I would be silent. That Don was her husband. [Cheryl's] No wonder we disliked each other on sight. A musician she says. One of his eyes doesn't work. Zoë reads music. - Music. Farron's invitation to the band, learn drums she says. "There's our drummer." This whole group is adolescence revised. How long will it take?? Home. Happiness. I'll be able eventually to go there again. Clean alone. People-think. New! New! - Still there in the morning, I am bored because I have given up and you black angel remind me.
Consciousness apart from conversation - ? ie awareness of who's listening, their capacities. Idealizing being - "What are we as idealizing beings?" Desires "In free reverie they speak in order to admit their desires, to communicate in the tranquility of the well harmonized double nature." But outside, "virtual reality." Jung the subconscious is a primary nature, not a repressed consciousness. Androgeneity - 51 percent - the weirdness of naming some dialectic masculine-feminine when the real m's and f's do not correspond to those descriptions but to the whole dialectic itself. Love-life a mode. C - she wants to go in a straight line, a saint. I accused her of wanting to have a perfect record and she said not a saint, a monk - digressions. I'm not finished with the erotic mode and its illusions. I had nothing to learn from Paul, except freedom and observant praise. Imagine - I have imagined but not thoroughly - a friend who could be counted on to understand correctly - how much faster I could leave the social infancy behind. Did she have that? She speaks as if she did. - Here Judy Ritter and Patrice, sleek brown slowspoken Patrice, and Judy strung up tight but for a little while holding to a thrilling conversation - when I was talking about Cheryl, or in general talking about what it means to engage on the most interesting level - moral questioning, dialectics of choices of being - oblique and elliptical - she said, about early days with Patrice, "I kept sending out things to see if she'd miss them, and she never did miss them." - Projects and worries, two ways of not being present to the self, belong to the animus. Reverie which lives the present of happy images belongs to the anima. - Don [C] - a man whose existence I love with all my heart - that is simply it. One of your gestures enough to do me all my life. Alchemy - action of moral patience which searches out the impurities of a consciousness. The alchemist is an educator of matter. Elaborated reveries - reveries that want to be thoughts. Complex convictions, convictions which assemble syntheses of thoughts and conglomerates of images. Gaston Bachelard 1968 The poetics of reverie: childhood, language and the cosmos Viking I said to C "What's happening is that we are always talking the same dialectic, but it rotates so that I take the side you have just taken and you take the side I originally took." a lover, a being dreaming of another being reverie study = study of idealizing being a 'philosophy of reverie' Film is a ceremony which prepares entry to a vision. Film is a behavioral engineering situation / perceptual. Phenomenology - tonality of thoughts or images My background - is such and such but my specialty is sensory resonance. Imagining being, "all the poets who invent the prestigious increments to the human dimension" Transfer - passes over social situations to link cosmic situation - crisscrossing projections Interior transfer that carries us beyond ourselves into another ourselves Adam as severity and will, Eve as tenderness Throughout a long quest for unification in androgeny, gynandrony constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love About a book "These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty." Goethe says Das Magnet ist ein Urphänomen teaches himself to repress nothing. The reveries of excessive idealization are liberated from all repression. Jung quoted "I have defined the anima very simply as the archetype of life." One contradiction more or less will not matter to philosophy. - Your play - and the other waits, without impatience, to see whether the visit will be returned, a formality of faith, there is no seducer here. Oh is it you? The first time - theatre entering my life again - the first time you called me, "This is Cheryl. How's things?" and I said how I was (astonished) and your voice quaked and mine quaked in reply (oh warmth coming off you and your daughter standing in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs where there was no light - radiating like bread you were, when I opened the door) and when I had hung up the telephone I lay thrown against the wall with my mouth open, and my heart banging me like a drum, flung down, shocked, touched by a weird finger - wise-body, what you don't know. You're making history for me. If the carefully chosen substance causes psychotropisms, it is because here are psychotropisms. Cogito - watch for it - I'm not sure it is impossible in night dreams- The image brings us an illustration of our astonishment. Poets, he says, give us psychotropic images "by which we animate an awakened oneirism ... poetics of reverie ... causes consolidations of imagined worlds, developing the audacity of constructive reverie, coordinating liberties, opening all the prisons of being." The dreamer's cogito moves off and goes to lend its being to things, to noises and to fragrances. Who is existing? What a relaxation for our own existence. "With the compassion of churchyards" says Maggie. The chosier, ie cabinet of objects "samples of unknown universes" - I found a perfect, cut? crystal? amethyst on a pile of stones, sensation of gradual recognition - C, when I told her the dream, said why did I want perfect things - here is the answer. "To keep company with objects, there must not be too many." "Fleeting modes" defense of philosophy of reverie: "Reverie is manifest psychic activity. It contributes documentation on differences in the tonality of being." "The intermediary region which separates from the world is a full region, of a light fullness." c/f Nathalie Granger Imaginary drugs Angel film - work toward the idea of angels. - Le Guin lives in Portland. Herbert in Port Townsend. -
The fire of kemmer - estrus - passion - making the body bright. "They are the same," said Stokven, and laying his palm against Estraven's showed it was so: their hands were the same in length and form, finger by finger, matching like the two hands of one man laid palm to palm. "I have never seen you before," Stokven said. "We are mortal enemies." He rose, and built up the fire in the hearth, and returned to sit by Estraven. "We are mortal enemies," said Estraven. "I would swear kemmer with you." "And I with you," said the other. - What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety.. . I was never an outstanding farfetcher. To oppose vulgarity is to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk another road. - without shame, and without desire, like the angels Scares me. dothe-strength I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. Imagined anthropology, tales. - Perspective. C and Nellie, who couldn't meet except in me, the two creatures who balance each other out, both evading me, as I want them to. Nellie's absences always forcing me to think what am I connected to this woman for; well, I think (bien, c'est ) immediately of a certain look she has, her best look - that is Nellie the pilot, Nellie the possible, Nellie the essential Nellie, Nellie in my mythology some practical truthful light white unowned power, man-woman at the gear lever or steering wheel - crying a few tears, setting humorously and deftly to licking a clit, cooking a meal, building a work bench, relaxing and seducing whoever she finds herself next to. Cheryl (try thinking of it as a fictional name) building her image to me as refusal, the dark side of her face sending out one flash of - When I think of our tiny history it seems to me as beautiful as a legend, and beautiful on the level of legend, because it wakes me up to my real hunger.
The friends and lovers of legend knowing how to glide in the tension of attraction without giving up and easing themselves. "I don't relax" says she. Oh nor I! Not in yr little kitchen. For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose .... For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. Within an hour of our evening meal Estraven turned the stove down, if it was feasible to do so, and turned the light-emission off. As he did so he murmured a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had ever learned of the Handdara: "Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished." C: today, when I think of it, she is invoking Joe Comerford, Ian MacIntosh, yesterday Don. Electrifying sense of secret kinship in a chosen people. None of the stupefactions of reassurance. Silence in which messages grow.
I remember in Oxford onetime with Don, puzzled when he wanted to make love - didn't he understand that wasn't it? If not I couldn't refuse. And out of it came the loveliest gesture of my life, worth all the years of screwing Roy, which was never anything.
And Nellie, technical marvel of human comfort, welcome my body won't you so I can go on confidently in this dance, sword dance, on a dazzling gangplank with that black planet I've taken into my wildest hopes - my undomesticated hopes. Telepathy. How delicately Le Guin uses it. The first time Ai uses it with Estraven - Marguerite Duras saying of Détruire dite-elle that she was inventing forms of social interaction. Who was alert, she or I? Whose vigilance knew first that we could transpose to a key closer to our private mode. I was magnificent, but I wasn't conscious as I was with Joe.
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