| dames rocket 3 part 5 - july 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Intelligible geometry say the Sufis: "this science is one of the gates through which we move to the knowledge of the essence of the soul, and is the root of all knowledge." Wallace Stevens "No one tries to be more lucid than I. If I do not succeed something is not communicated because not shared." Brigit Riley "I have always tried to realize visual and emotional energies simultaneously from the medium ... One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one and the same." At the party I met Karen whose house has great lumpy seashells, ferocious things, cactus, and a piranha in the kitchen - she is I believe the lover of Dr Lynn, and she is herself immense with flowing hair and an Emily Carr face. Nellie jeering at Anika's titties! Impatience with Wende because she seems to me to be wallowing but she is persistent in explaining that she needs 'strokes' and hugs and thanks and praise and has little of what I need (objective excitement) to offer. I kept insisting that she could step out of her anxieties like old clothes and go free, but she like Judy Ritter says she has "high affiliative needs," doesn't want to do that. I give my hide a shake and go off at a cross guilty lope to cash the family allowance check and buy
When I went to bring Luke his lunch all the children had already sat down with their packages in front of them, and there sat Luke with only a cup of milk. I put his lunch box in front of him and he peeked in and ducked and smiled because there was a nectarine and a Chinese cake. What a moment of pathos, Luke without any lunch - - At the party, Nellie's party presence, small slight Nellie standing up to people she hardly knows all enthusiasm and hugs and exclamations ("putting out a lot") - and I watched them disregard her and she watched them monologize me and she winked. And then we went home and got Luke from Judy Lynn's house and set out the bed on the floor (she won't forget it) and she rushed into her loud-breathing dreams in my arms, and we slept touching bums. I like a fit we had, with my face along her shoulder and her hip in my waist. [sketch] - Bachelard accepts praise and admiration as worthy work. The work of angels? Could imagine nymphs as "flexible sisters of the fires which run across the surface of the pond." "She is a water who wishes verticality, a hard and vigorous water." A force. "Oneiric continuity which unites dreams of swimming with dreams of flight." L'air et les songes The sky becomes an aerial water. The sky is then, for the water, the call to a communion in the verticality of being. The water which reflects the sky is a depth of the sky. The winged being which turns in the sky and the waters which are going on their whirls make an alliance. What do hawks dream about, sleeping up there as they turn? Aren't they too carried away by a whirlpool.
Quoting Audiberti: Intoxicated with so many skies eaten like seeds, seeds of the blue medicine which makes one fly, she walks, she is still walking, but already she is sprouting wings, black wings of night, cut out by the spiny ridge of the mountains. No! The mountains themselves are part of the substance of those wings, the mountains with their mountain pastures, their little houses, their spruce trees. She permits these wings to live, to beat. They are going to beat. They do beat. She walks, she is flying. She stops walking. She flies. She is everywhere that which flies. a psychology of wonder poetry is one of the destinies of speech We get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. goal of phenomenology is to situate awareness in the present Phenomenological resonance - Eugene Minkowski There are still souls for whom love is the contact between two poetries.
- She lives close to her skeleton. - SFU - second benefit [dance] in balmy July. Pathos and joy: Suma and Jane, since November, parted, who were so strong and noisy together last time, Suma a spectacle falling apart on stage, continuous sex jokes, she's hungry she's telling us - then she came on as Angela in a wig and was more comfortable - Jane wrecked her I think, Jane stronger in her music every time I see her - Baby Ruth - of course it is Jane who has a new lover. There was a quiet face I saw first at the poetry reading, then yesterday on the street - recognized a type I know, the quiet smiler, always gravity there - farm woman with plump hips, works in the post office - when she was thirteen there was a woman three years older - Nellie embracing everyone, looking tired and fat, the room full of her ex-lovers - Mimi wanting to talk [to me], starting by saying "I hope you didn't get hurt too much." Aline with her shrewd gropp stupid face, and Mimi delicate but fat - Aline was Nellie's idea of sex appeal? Laurine necking with various people in various corners. Marilyn, when she danced close with Lise, closed her eyes. Sheila first too forward - then when I left, she wanted an encounter and stayed angry but in the end jumped up and held me too close for the Home Waltz, which was not a waltz. - Sunday afternoon, lovers' peace after separation, enquiry, our two colors of thigh glistening side by side as we look at the white ceiling and she says "I love you and I don't love you, I want you and I don't want you, that's how it always is out there, but we seem to go a little deeper and that's why I come back." The white room taking on life and music cutting through air. "You'd skate with a limp." - Heavy meeting at Judy Lynn's. Anneke, Maggie, Judy Lynn, Patrice, Phyllis, Paula, Anne, Karen, Madeleine, Shelley. Maggie spoke beautifully with her face lit and smiling - said that if she didn't work her head filled with thoughts that were unanswerable "about my life and the world." When she was speaking I saw the beauty of the island girl again. Patrice's blooming legs - Neil's sudden smile when I stroked his head - Lucy's charm - Casey breaking into tears wanting to go home - I had a tenderness for children today that I think comes from going through the roof with Nellie, the beautiful sex of our last two times, my cunt hasn't turned itself off. Want to think more about that meeting but am going to sleep - a meeting we got excited by. - The woman in white shirt who said "Do you want to dance" - brown eyes - she took my hands and we were working it out so that I was getting easier - I mean, the quality of her hands. - Angels - sudden visit of a superior being News, announcement Fascism "the aestheticization of political life" says Walter Benjamin. Scares and accuses me. - Anne McLean read Diamond Lil - the two floozies who go into the bush and are followed by the man with the eyepatch - she challenges them - Diamond Lil kisses her friend on the mouth and suggests he shoot himself in the head - he does, looking injured in his vanity. Also Anne's dream about the four men who appear - read a proclamation that she is to be raped by all of them - she looks at the fourth, who is very beautiful, in a hooded cloak - and suggests they get it over with - the first three do their best to degrade her and she is untouched - when the fourth comes into her she has a "thousand volt orgasm" - seems to indicate a very sound Anne - and also the way she holds her bony face which gives off light - Also: dream of the crow being born from the wall. Says her imagination is historical not narrative. Also dream of the planets all together, big as the moon, and music coming from them. Her father's boots - she wears them (they are a little small) now that he has died, and they take her places she wouldn't go otherwise (she says). She collected many dreams of rape. - Hofmannsthal - I refound the Letter of Lord Chandos after all this time. He describes my Los Angeles state of things being unreal and nauseating - "a kind of slight poisoning, a hidden and creeping infection which seems to be lying ready in the European air." For months I have been surrounded by a deluge of faces ravaged by money which they owned or by money which others owed ... thousand-fold mirrored grimace of their spookish Non-Existence ... to drop in somewhere and read the newspapers was equally impossible, for they talked only too much the same language as the faces and the houses. - from Colours To be singled out. But perhaps all this which appeared to me like a promise was but the crude foreboding of a very great thought, which my soul could not master. But truly in no moment am I more a human being than when I feel myself living with hundredfold strength, and this happens to me when that which has always lain mute and closed before me and is nothing but massiveness and strangeness, when this opens, and, as in a wave of love, entwines me with itself. and am I not then at the inner core of things as much a human being, as much myself, as ever I could be - nameless, alone; not however petrified in aloneness, but as if there flowed from me in waves the strength that make some the chosen mate of those strong, silent powers which sit around me mutely as on thrones? His story of a younger sister, disguised as a boy, who is the confidant of a man courting her older sister. She loves him and writes him letters; eventually she becomes his lover. He continues to believe that his night mistress is the woman who daytimes is so cold and unrelated to him. He delights in having both utter open passion and evasion and indifference. -
- 5. It seemed wise and delicate to me, to leave as she did when I could have stood up holding her and shaking for much more of the late night - and I was satisfied to go to bed alone, BUT at night I dreamed a long courtship of Vera Williams who in the end scorned me, "I could develop fantasies around your face and head, but your body ..." Was it Nellie I was dreaming? Or was it Cher-yl "This is Cheryl" says the soft voice. "I know by now." - Idries Shah 1964 The Sufis Octagon Press
Development of "more spectacular powers for which the dynamic force is love" The main motive of its growth is love, a sudden surprising recognition of love so rare and high that the heart seems to sprout wings. Black planet in Arabic - black and wise differ very slightly and plays often made Nubian What are the crippling illusions - vs archetypes, energy Arabic apparently "retains groups of words in their closely associated primitive meanings" - families The Work - working to awaken a certain field of consciousness Bite. Fire in the meeting with Piran of London Sleep. The veiling, conditioning a science, an art, a knowledge, a Way, a tribe To involve oneself only with the loved, to work among them Coffee - originally used to heighten awareness Aim is consciousness not behavior Believes - evolution - telepathic and prophetic - need for evolution creating evolution - attainment of stages permanent - magnetic or centrifugal force Fear produces heightened perception Homecoming Adventures Awakeness Money Only on occasion can the mind escape its machine. Brethren of Sincerity - secret society of publishers - And this dialogue is always there too: no seduction of hers, it was in my replies from the beginning. She makes herself the pillar of presence, which I court and dance around. Passive speech she says, "I'm amazed at how aggressive your speech is." "I want to meet you" I said [on the phone]. "It will happen" she said as if with mysterious knowledge. The Courted. I am used to being her. Because of that I had to wait until she invited me: in the hallway, I wait, the stairs drop into dark. She stands next to them and says what I had prepared to say, "I want to hold you." And I jump up, and our arms collide finding the way around. And she stands like a pillar because it is me coming to her, and my true impulse is to move my face over her neck and cheek, I want to touch her head with my head, there's no sex, it is loveliest love, I find myself rolling my face over hers, bowing my head onto her shoulder, meantime I'm aware she's holding me with one hand and I say "What are you doing with you other hand?" (Holding onto a post??) Her little ribcage - she's thinner - I'd like to die so that she could be with me, dying - meantime I'm shaking like a motor on idle - a purr of fear - our breath is the same, two lines in Morse ------ ------. Diagrammed they're identical. I don't want to stop, she does. "I'm gone," she says, "I'm glad t'know ya." I have nothing to say, she goes down the stairs and I stumble to bed and lie awake listening for her coming back because it is too soon to part. I wait. I'm glad to wait. I feel the air full of miracle, all substance is more awake. "There was another time," she said, "It was at Customcolor. You were looking at slides." "You went by with someone." "It was Trudy." I remember that flash, like recognition of secret membership. I thought it was lesbianism. Saw them somewhere before. There was another time. O vigilance! Something to be vigilant for! "You make everything sound so terrific" she says. "I live an extravagantly emotional life, my connections are all very carefully balanced." And physically austere. Like Mafalda. Quest writings Thirst for the Beloved The ecstatic's parallel, the person who feels frequent and incomplete love and who although deeply affected by it is not regenerated and altered by it to such an extent that his very being undergoes a change. This is the fire of love which purifies, which is different whenever it occurs, which sears the marrow and makes incandescent the kernel. The ore separates from the matrix, and the Perfect emerges, altered in such a way that every aspect of her life is ennobled. She is not changed in the sense of being different; but she is completed, and this makes her powerful. Every fibre has been cleared, raised to a higher state, vibrating more profoundly, giving out a more penetrating note, attaching affinity in man and woman; is loved more and hated more; partakes of a destiny, a portion, infinitely assured and recognized. Elias and Ekbal
As I/you change, my/your history changes also The drone of loneliness - is it a physical illness? The twin exercises of identification and detachment The mystical state is for the dervish only the beginning of a true relation to objective reality. When the force of gravity was too strong I would shut my eyes - but I lay around soft and easy, showing belly skin. "Do you sometimes smile when you're in pain?" "Yes." Shock. When she spoke of taxis I offered a sleeping bag and I smiled, lying on my stomach with my eyes shut. - Oh let me know, I'm so hungry, I'm in pain, I've begun to be in pain on account of you, and I don't understand how even so slowly we can become one; and how can I bear not to; you are evoking my sharpest hunger and now I've got no help in it, I'm on my own with it - is it since Cheryl that my sex has been open? No, how superstitious. "It is a very erotic time, it has been for months" I said. "No not for months" she said firmly. Said it. It isn't Nellie at all, it is terror of that dark woman who is playing me in - now comes the time of fear and doubt, my denial is dissolving - I need warrior strength for this, she has so much more support. Time to get references, I think - Susie is not home. Caught myself dialing Nellie. That's tomorrow. How could she not love someone who showed such joy, meeting her? Most people make do with a very rough approximation of their capacities. Should I resign from the human drama that's building - is it? It must be. It is building toward pain, for me - how long can I hold out. A lovemaking where every gesture is true. Could I stand it. It's so braided up with all my loves, Nellie, Don, Marilyn, the large and small intimations. Nellie, you're a flatterer. You make people feel you care for them more than you do. You are a seducer. Playboy. Cheryl, do I have to be truthful and work out ahead, all my reservations. Because so much is possible. Do I have to give it up to have it.
Invent somethings, costumes, for you I have to be armed with every beauty I have.
-
Don't you know I'm reading this dumb book lookin' for ways to withstand / be worthy of you -
A complete Sufi may be called a Master of Time - meaning master/mistress of starting and stopping, of modifying cognition. States of experience called gifts Errors, in judging individuals, groups etc. Self deception love
Michael de Courcy 1976 Greetings from the urban wilderness street installation City. Finding ways to accept what I see, being as clear as I can be about where I am Wildlife = angels - The activating of the subtleties - awaken 5 of 7 centers Concentrate attention on certain areas The personality may be at times wakeful and versatile enough to accept the wakening of a Center. There are counterfeit states which have a sensation of knowledge, but no knowledge. Discrimination, catching up. - Our dialogue: I have been shrinking to fit, because I have no friends.
I have been confused, not believing myselves
Greed compressed - I'm good at it Not wanting to waste or lose the resource you are -
-
Feeler gauge v thin metal strips in a fan, a high vibratory quality Miracles need emotional intensity - aroused and concentrated The cure is always known to the disease. The attraction of a Sufi teacher is essentially because of intuitive recognition. Synthetic personality carries over into consciousness. You cannot teach by disagreement. "Sufized Guru Nanak" "the land" = the mind He loved that being as much as he loved himself, because through this he glimpsed what was possible to him. He wept because he was no longer afraid. He wept because he was no longer alone, even though that to which he had been joined was hidden. He wept for all he hoped to understand. He wept because he realized he had been lonely. With Don, Ian, & C: one of the things we have tried to do, is speak without speech. -
- Mary Staton's story of the girl (wolf child) who learns of everything after she is conscious - the story of the desert and then the pool and the reflection. The stunned child looks at her stunned mentor. She feels the other rising out of her brain and body, materialize, die a little, and become distinct across a new and different distance between them. Tears come into the girl's eyes as she feels the double edge of naming. She leaps across the space to recover the distance. Her legs and arms grip her mentor, and she holds on, sobbing. Mikkran feels the girl's full light softness in her arms for the first time and weeps as they are reunited. "An adult hunger." No. Nellie's always there, too. I reason about her choices, I love her. The one thing I foraged out of the Sufi book, besides reminder, was a vision of the partiality of people and their work - make me see Roy, for instance, and Judy Ritter, differently. The essential thrust of their language was control and ownership where control and ownership are not possible. A person's natural involvement is in the self. It is focused on the pleasurable discovery of the possibilities in selfness. It means doing, not possessing. Owning refracts that focus, diffuses the impulse to do. Orders Getting into the book, there's Anne Sexton in her: "the changes piling up in him like rocks" - sensuality and a dry approximate use of images by family-feel - "round and pink is nothing at all, her nipples like two soft, old eyes, her navel the hole of a nose, her pubic hair a smiling goatee" - frozen moment technique - "the callus on her heel makes the sound of an exhaled breath on the stone." These microscoping observations are like pins holding us into the invented space. Catherine McKinnon She's like a swallow
5 authors:
The whole object of the family is to create the future in the image of the past Learning is psychological brutality Events - earthquake - birth - so rare, we lose understanding of them The sound glides up from underneath what can be heard and barely enters the audible spectrum. Death "the cooling lack of motion as molecules tire of their continual orbits and fall to the bottom, not yet exhausted, only finished." When will men start to write under assumed names of women? Puzzles: art objects as puzzles - they have always been that. Tears fall over the edges of his eyelids like tiny rocks. - Weil in Waiting on God, saying carnal love is all part of the desire for god and that therefore the crimes are only in trying to "dispense with consent" - the consent must come from the "central point in the soul that says yes to nothing less than the eternal." - Knowing how to locate the absolute outside pleasure. Mass in C for 4 soloists Beethoven - Thanks for this brown and thin body, which has got thin suddenly by itself, because of our poverty? We've eaten mostly vegetables - but bread and a lot of butter too. Cheryl! Today I'm impatient and restless, telephoning Nellie in vain, on pretexts, but it's a skin-fix I'm after, and who else but solid Para/dox-body Her, just because I'm comfortable with her, it was touching me to remember her messy breathing when she's excited - and she's done something for me too, got rid of my badness. At Judy Lynn's today I kept hanging about her hall mirror admiring my brown thin belly; the purple satin windbreaker from the alley, plaid shirt tied up. -
- Sorrows today - Luke, when I was irritated with him, saying You're getting meaner and meaner - I said Yes I know I am, and the reason is I really need a rest from you, and when you've gone to the mine for a while I will not be so mean. He shouted that he wasn't going, and he wept. Coming home from the beach, I was holding Lucy's hand because she was company, and Luke slugged her - I slugged him, harder than I meant, in the belly, and he cried very much. When we got to the bus stop I told him I was sorry and I hugged him but he cried all the way from Burrard to Main, little wail. It is hard times. Earlier this month we were so harmonious. Am I so restless and nasty because my adult loves are not right? Little Ellie Ego makes trouble when I try to detach myself from her, and don't feed her. Or is it poverty? - Mar-tha, Mar-tha: my adult loves are all wrong and anyway, is there nothing else to do with all our time? The earth is not the centre of the universe, Ellie Epp does not understand why she should work hard to be marvelous, what depends on it? And yet Ellie Epp demands to be marvelous. Dream of teeth falling out - in my dream I realized I was dreaming by checking the credibility of certain images - decided to dream it more fully and lose all my teeth - felt them like little stones, cherry pits, on my tongue. Another dream of an old woman in a house full of wonderful old things, I'd been camping or skulking about thinking of taking various wonderful things, there was a garden too, but maybe I became friends with the old woman, as usual the strongest element in the dream was the wonderful things and the sensation of finding and wanting them. I think of Paul and mourn, needing to see him and talk to him. Now I've put in my apprenticeship in courting and rejection, in wanting and asking and being refused. - Love and work: tell myself let go, it's a real sacrament, it's work, but also I say to myself, why should I, it's a con, it's a biological misadjustment, it's our mistaken condition - but is it, necessarily? Isn't there anything else to do? Or am I just not investing enough in it to make it real to myself, or any use at all? The vision of a jungle hospital and work 18 hours of the day, take our mind off it. Feel useful and necessary. Written at the mine 4 miles above McGillvray Falls. - Rilke's Book of Hours - inventing god in order to have someone to talk to. But through your dark blood are being circulated rumours of God ... I know my being is infinite desire Divers and towers envy you God is in darkness, "I roamed away where angels sail / high up where light begins to pale"
- What god says just before she makes us. He talks to god in the equality of an angel, knowing they create each other.
On the soundtrack of Ideas of angels I say
(I sent this message, and it was to Cheryl, and I got 2 answers 1. about angels 2. Nellie phoned and wants to come over!) Angels are about longing, heavenly lovers. Rilke's vision of flightless angels like penguins. All of a sudden he's talking about failed angels, a monk thinks he's flying ends up swimming. Scrounging in the culture. The message I keep sending myself in Nellie is that I can't have because I want. I must again refuse to want, in order to have. Wanting or having? We started out separate by anger, came close by confession, and ended as we were, I hurt and excluded by my hunger from the possibility of 'having'. Because she has another lover, I must have another, or she will despise me.
News of Amin's killing of perhaps 1000 students, shot, thrown out of 4th floor windows, raped. Breasts cut off. The students had been most active in protesting his regime. Amin and his crew are illiterate. - What is this season of pain about? For? I told Nellie too much is happening at once, "You've opened up my sex box, and Cheryl's opened the other one, and that just leaves me hungry in all directions!" She laughed. "It's a very hard time for me, and I just have to get through it somehow," I said. She said nothing, looked absent. I said "What?" She said, "I don't know, something, I can't say." I picked up the map and went down the corridor to my room and closed the door and sat down and heard, after silence, Nellie's feet going down the stairwell. She's gone off me. A hard moment, but interesting, when we were talking about her other loves and my lack of them. "But I don't get out of them what I get out of something that happens with you" she said. "Yes you do" I said; I was thinking about something else and didn't hear myself say it. "Yes I do" she said. Like a hammer. It's not having any money for months now. It's being lovely, rarely, and not having a lover. It's not having play and talk and relief in my house. It's the first long sexual hunger of my life. It's fright and desolation about the movie (remember how it was with the other, how lonely I was.) It's the crisis about not caring about myself. It's the badness of not feeling Luke's existence and worrying about him. It's admitting that Cheryl is playing me for power. It's understanding that Nellie and I are over. Reading an Inuit woman talk about how her people are vanishing, I began to sob, rock, weep; I am so far from my griefs that someone else's story acts for my pretext to cry. I don't think I gave Nellie too much power; I think she just didn't recognize my existence. I think she didn't want to know who I am. She is always diminishing me, like a man. She is not a lover, she doesn't see, except in those rare times. - ML Brigge, in a café, sees a man dying - "And yet I was only able to understand that man because within me too something is happening, that is beginning to draw me away and separate me from everything ... If my fear were not so great, I should console myself with the fact that it is not impossible to see everything differently and yet to live." Rilke 1910 The notebooks of of Malte Laurids Brigge Im Insel Verlag I haven't been confessing myself well in here, I need a human, I'm still full of pain.
Reading Rilke for loneliness cure is whisky prescribed for alcoholism. The loneliness of university, concerts, joy, unshareable. Repeating itself from early childhood. How do I make myself so lonely? The old brown house - Luke and I coming home through twilight, crossing onto the wet lawn, crying out Hello moldy brown house! Paul gave me good support and made me very strong. No one calls up my rightful speech, I have no peers. Cheryl, your own invention, better than Martha Seaplane, but where. Luke's picture of a book in his head, which he turns, finds songs and pictures. Crying on the mountainside. You don't like me. - 6. Record. Just because it was so comforting. Leaning against the wall, drinking fast (but that's not why), saying "And also I think I was angry with you because you've made a little fissure in me," drawing a zipper on the sternum, "and it's made me very hungry." "Do you think I haven't been fighting that all week?" "I'm glad I'm not in it alone." "You never are, it's always two people." "But you're never sure, it always seems possible that you're the only one." Trudy is beautiful. She's water, C is rock or soil, sandstone, a cliff. She's a flash of rivers a river of lights. Three black women walking up Hastings to and from the Ovaltine. Did I start to tell old stories, because Trudy hadn't heard them? I did. Something direct at last, because of getting clear of Nellie. ("I'm going to fuck around and you're going to take your power back" and I did, yesterday paid for it and today got it. Do I want it?) Spent tonight not looking at Cheryl but this is what I saw. Spectacles and a beautiful line from forehead down the outer cheek, with hair next to it. At the café, talking about what wanting is, Trudy says "You only want what you have." C says "You can want something that's right in front of you." T says you can't. C and I, in chorus, cry out "Yes you can!" and we all laugh because we mean each other. Trudy loose and warm, I've decided I'd have to love her too. Loose and warm, me too, because of moving right with Nellie, letting her go, I was glad when she cried, and we drank a bottle of wine and were happy that we were free, both of us released and thrilled. Last night afterward was Trudy's night. Did she understand my play, when I moved (they upstairs) into the spot where she'd sat, in order to shift C a choice of sitting next to both of us again. Woke to a film angel image of a white ash blowing. Sound of a door slamming and then something set loose, clanking. Wah - wah - wah. The underbeat of the gallery blinds [this became the film Current] Her face is to swim in. C's three-quarters profile another v clear face, especially with the spectacles, her profile is a glutton's. The click on of her smile - it jumps on. Wanting is giving yourself a choice at the moment, that is how to keep it from being greedy. NGE, not good enough. To write something I would be able to read in my voice.
|