| dames rocket 3 part 6 - august 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Woke happy at 7. Turned on the radio, went back to sleep. Dreamed a very coherent warning that went like this: I arrive at Cheryl's house in an afternoon. We seize each other, C says "I have to warn you I'm a fucker." I say I am too, but that she'd seemed more chaste to me. She pushes her tongue deep into my mouth and we kiss very confusedly, so much of her mouth is inside mine that it washes about with nothing to meet it. We strip in a room off a corridor, bit like a hotel room. She begins immediately to fingerfuck me - I want slow quiet soft voluptuous rapture. She suddenly demands to be made love to violently. I say it isn't for her that I was going slowly, but for me. I understand that it is all over and get up embarrassed to look for my clothes, which are back in the room where I'd left her. Meanwhile she is in the corridor talking to some of the many people who are hanging about. She taunts me that if I were a man I'd have left much sooner. I accuse her of setting it up with Trudy. She says "No, I didn't even let her know, the other two times I did this I gave her a hint." A woman sitting nearby says she used to live there, "In this cold-blooded intellectual place the most cruel? extraordinary? things happen." We look out the window and see Cheryl and Trudy below on the sidewalk, Cheryl with a stick. She lifts it, clubs a baby dead, and they carry it away together. I leave by a back door. Woke up confronted with the dream like a landslide, a fact, nothing is the same, my hope is rebuked. I add up a few other things I do finally know. 1. Trudy is not worried 2. C has already betrayed me once to her friends 3. She's a despiser and she encourages mine to grow, why wouldn't she despise me too, I'm not sure she doesn't, and never have been 4. Nero and her man. They are spoiled, greedy and arrogant - the curve of her nose, and the reverse curve under her chin - To be 'made a woman' by being screwed, how offensive. E Dickinson "that confidence in fraud." Nellie, as we drank wine, laying her head on my knee. Then when I'd faced the dream, Jud's letter telling how Roy is these days. "Evil drunken Kevin has it that she lives almost alone in a squalid squat with her new baby, and Roy the bastard comes and goes, is drunken, is having affairs, will not live with her, will not leave. All the social security money given to him because they are married. She hates him and loves him and he is her only support. Alas for Sara. She's copped it worse than me or even you." - I'm interested in how much of a love affair I can have with you / without touching you. The devil's advocate in her motherly flesh. Angels lost authority of the Byzantine and became charming children more and more infantile. Boehme - The holy angels converse and walk up and down in the innermost of the world. Fox had 'openings' into knowledge. Blake says Good is the passive that obeys Reason, Evil is the active springing from Energy. Play of the two. Satan "No other but the angel of this life Whose care is lest man see too much at once." Imagination an angel. Dickinson 'flood subjects' that are about essential meanings on the border between Hungary and Croatia, where his father was stationmaster The angel experience of unseen presence - 'one more' than can be seen - someone alone on Everest. - I was longing for you on the bus. I was an ache. Later, I tell myself, and I go to the Greek Islands and eat and read Le Guin and talk to Anna who tells me I am a smart woman and walks me up as far as the traffic light. People are all glass or air, the spaces between ego. I was longing for you on the bus. I want to pile myself up along you and just wait, what else is there to do. Three bodies at the table shining their faces at each other like flashlights, sometimes right and sometimes left. When I hear the train pass, it's like what I want, the soft crash of bodies swaying together by the weight of breath and heartbeat alone. Crash, crash, crash, that's why I stop to listen to it, and think of waves. I was longing for you in the old way, of adolescence and before, pressing my body down on beds. What does it mean, it is so occult. I can hardly attend to it unless I'm in science fiction. The pattern it is making, and with that dream in it like a lidded box or a closed cupboard in which is sealed - the antithesis, the reminder, an evil genius, an imp. Game - go outside of el yep, make the dissociation completely (for that need mirror or? at first), let her talk to me. The I to be left is both the I of memory and sensation, and the I of the uncon. - Energy and Reason instead of male and female. Tantra says Nature is a dream ie thought substance which as its vibration level slows, becomes sound, then light, then matter. Contemplating yantra, "just as each form is the visible product of an energy pattern rooted in sound" - therefore thoughts can create things, by intense visualization. Imagine - gift waves of energy coming toward - a protective circle. Try to get a continuity into dream state and out, work to control. Before I give her up should I find out who she is. Telepathy by sending love as a stream and floating your message on it. Psychic reading - deep relaxation, first breathing then counting down 10-1 - let images come and just note and let go - come out by 1-3. Astral travel by visualization. Energy involved doesn't all have to come from our own batteries, you can just prime the pump and let it go. Bruner - creation conditions:
- Nellie likes my poem - carries it with her, takes it out and reads it, shows it.
- Dream of another place, big old apartment - moving through it excited by finding - piano, on the porch (had a little number with an Englishwoman next to it) - the dream kept veering away and coming back - like a place that exists - various rooms - a sense of expansion into hangings, colors, all around wonderful old furniture, thinking about what to keep and what not to, an outside porch, and trees and buildings and worrying 2 military boxes, like the guardhouse, at airports and beyond, a motorway. Was my place inside or outside of their jurisdiction. Cheap, charm, space, woodstoves, a door which when I opened it let me see, up some stairs, the end of a bed with a man's sleeping legs, window light on them. I shut the door, thinking of it as a door into someone else's place. In the mirror saw myself wearing scarves and jewelry, looking vivid and showy, thinking ooh I'm in a very different phase now. Woke and slept. It was close to waking, just by its solidity, and went back to it after waking. Had been trying self-hypnosis and went off saying Cheryl Cheryl etc to get a message about her - I'd forgotten that until just now - a chance to give my morality away (to the policeman) and be gaudy, is she? Basic feeling of dream good pleasure at where I found myself, my new place. Different from other place dreams because of its relation to outside. - Dreamed a fantasy, my father struggling on the floor with a woman. I'll fantasize him raping her I said, and imagined his penis dangling out. I'll imagine him raping me, I said, and I'll submit to it and love him for it. I imagined a tenderness toward him (but didn't imagine the rape except as 'having happened'). - 7. Drunk to fall into free speech - gathering your wrist and turning like a Ferris wheel around it - acts - a month's photographs of elegant shit - six months' of kitchen tables - friends pointing - how different I am - my poems about objects held still. Hers about objects held still. Hers about moving things from one place to another. Let's wise up lady. It's one more repression, what's one more repression. "I see your pain, I see so much pain. It moves me. I have so much," in a pious tone. Down into the next block, Ellie! white shirt in the trees' shadows. WHAAAT? After that I was not there. Her early dreams of setting her stick down accidentally on babies' heads in a stream, killing them. Surprising light ardours. Why was she embracing me now that I had given up. The bed's three heads. Trudy with a fuzzy jacket over her head and a quilt on top, she's cold. "Just wait until you're the baby," she said. In a little whisper, "Why did you bring her?" "So she'd know she could come here." Freckled back. I'm never going to feel confirmed by that woman, her art is so different from mine, city woman that she is. "So where's the sexuality" she says. I imagined it as a challenge and cried out about consent and was she used to being courted extravagantly and kissed her and felt her fade out, and that's when the phone rang. The only sexual time was sitting in the gallery pushing and pulling at her balance with my own swaying. Drunk and sick I insisted that love and art are on the way but not all the way. "I can't take them seriously. There's something else, but I don't know what it is." "I take them totally seriously" she said. She was kind and honest, and she committed a flank to each of us, and didn't withdraw it ever. A thicket of differences, a thorn-wall. Winter. My imagination full of beautiful things. Again I've set myself in front of someone who won't love me. What was the grimace of goodbye, that was real. The bare shoulders. If I'm going to keep doing this I'll have to arm myself better. She's wearing me down. - Thinking about hunger/transcendence/etc. And Sontag - uness we're intelligent enough not to be religious - and all that - also of Roy using religion. Then of Cheryl - still feel silly writing that name here. Dreamed of learning to think while wrestling. Combat. - Furious and nothing to do but write in this dumb book. Nellie's doublecross in fact nothing real is happening there any more. My fury is that somebody so empty because of her ease precisely, and her carelessness, should have such an easy time and then undercut
Why the good the ardent impulse to cover with kisses to find under the cover -
- Listen old love, fucking is not what it's about; and I'll give it up; but I need access, because there are things I'm learning. That's my message to you. Also you have to understand that I'm alien, I am a country person and you don't know what that is, and I only know because of my fear of you (although I know what I am). But I need to sometimes go to sleep and wake up next to you, because it's different from your game of will.
Don't mistake me, it's not charm of yours; I knew before you did your come-on number (and yes of course I did know about that, Trudy) that something was up. Instantly - you remember. Also it occurs to me that you "have so-o-o much" as you keep telling me, because you don't take any risks. - 8. [on typed page] I am happy. Candy's body in fragments and yet lying so still. Warm bits, she was away in peyote - what did she see - I cried, like old days, because her abrupt impulse to suck my clit found my sex not there - forgave us though and got up after three hours to read the 5th ? elegy for the 3rd time and see it for the first time, the worn carpet laid like plaster on earth becoming the flowering meadow in which the first true lovers smile their first honest smile while the dead throw money of whatever kingdom they're in. Judy Ritter - "I know that you know that I know." What do you know? Why did you mind-speak me? Because you asked me to. Wain - face from the nose downward elongated by mass of painful silence. His lovely mouth. We got excited. He gave me a manuscript. Kept going to get poems. With both Wain and Judy (in your territory, one on either side of you) I tried to talk out of the accurate and foolproof code inside language and objects, which we understand directly - I had a sudden picture of it as Arabic or shorthand script - hooked gestures as of an arm, a coded choreography - Rilke works on it, and it is closer to the country than city art - angels are code for - what? The hope of a message. Is that what New York has given up? My lovely body, that has never been so before, and dances, as I saw in the window, with a lithe sway at knees hips and elbows. New time, back to bare feet and jeans and plaid shirt. Work on laughing less or not at all. I would like already to be acting in the new way. - Sensitives - talk about a shift of state - by deliberate change of breath - also what is interesting or relevant is not what we'd think. What are things like 'there'
1. sensory and other - sensory it is the separateness other or clairvoyant, the relatedness? mediumship = capacity for excursis
the falling of the barriers say that there is a dual process the hemming in the partitioning off the localizing the selfing. All that is one process. Now reverse it and say the escape the unifying the delocalization of the soul that is nearer testifying to the existence of the whole. Work on concentration Work on [illegible] intelligent presence at the time, but at will. As if writing. I realized for the first time that I am so 'slow' because I operate in a different mode most of the time - which - and that is my intellectual strength too. I don't mean to lose it - the inner vacancy where self is lent out. 'life in operation' Dr Lynn will have an operation on her spine - a steel rod and maybe failure. Judy Morton has cancer - has been walking with a cane. Mend in her the will to die, give her grace. Help us to find, soon enough, what we need to know - our communality. Culture - fabric of decisions about which experiences are real and which are not. Field theory. But what is 'the field' and what is 'the universe'? It is a primitive form of thought that things either exist or do not exist. Ineffability - Carmichael All art is committed to partiality. When a student of physics makes her first acquaintance with the theory of atomic structure and of quantum she must come to the rather deep and subtle notion which has turned out to be the clue to unraveling the whole domain of physical experience. This is the notion of complementarity, which recognizes that various ways of talking about experience may each have validity, and may each be necessary for the adequate description of the physical world, and yet may stand in mutually exclusive relationship to each other, so that to a situation to which one applies, there may be no consistent possibility of applying the other. Eckhardt "This above all, then, to be ready at all times for the gifts of God, and always for new ones." If separation is illusion then field-theory poetry is impossible or rather I hope so, cause I can't do it. Does the localization phase - the ego-building period of childhood, correspond to an impulse to localize things out there - ie the poetry of intense thingness, red wheelbarrow etc, and when the ego begins to unglue and want to delocalize does a corresponding wish arrive for objects? Or do these 2 processes criss-cross. C is very physically contained. Theatrum Dei Rimbaud reasoned derangement of the senses, dissolution of personality HEALING - method 1 - love, oneness - MB Eddy "Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are neither in nor of matter and the body will cease to utter its complaints." The physical benefits of love-, -being in or -making. Self-repair and immunology, both skills we haven't developed! ie human is not Natural - needs consciousness? Method 2 - what is between the hands. The Inner Way, the Middle Way, and the Outer. Alluvial slide, texture like feathers. The wing-shaped nasturtium through gauze, afterimage flying
The interpretation of cosmic and mystical experiences London James Clark 1969 An idea of religion as a human capacity, an organ that is unconscious but carries information and can be used. Dune - planetologist, adab "the demanding memory that comes on you of itself" Frank Herbert Dune first published in Analog Magazine in 1965 - 9. The mysteries are broken. I've a sudden clarity, the thing has organized itself - function of the mysteries is to let you project your desires - breaking the mysteries leaves another mode - sharpening - the spice change of (coffee) consequence - lines fanning out from a present awareness of modality - modulations - the hidden dream of control - Paul's vision of a cleft, a fault-line - prophecy is not prevision but field vision which sees the slip-line of space-time. stress - the mind leans toward unconsciousness or toward hyperconsciousness the Bene Gesserit
Nellie has certain powers - one is sexuality, the other is "I know things about people" - how to teach her to say what she knows. The way she's come to comfort me when I've struggled with these two. What is connection between sexuality and loyalty? A book is a programme, as in a computer. Feed oneself programs. Consciousness is what all of it is after, old Hegel is right. Or rather Marx is Hegel's antithesis. They making love next to me, Trudy putting her back along me so that I could feel their fucking like amplified heartbeat. No noise, very soft, breath, breath withheld, ahh. They talk quietly. My body is reshaping itself leaner in the middle / but without the face thinning. And yet it is oily too. What is it up to? Herbert's vocabulary - prana, bindu, blind time
Herbert's sci fi has more movie action, battles, hand-to-hand fights A sci fi story in which 2 women do hand-to-hand battle and then make love It's true, that of / in that last test-embrace, it was Trudy who made more of a mark. They're even in me. I'll tell them. Neck and neck. We made that adjustment. "Watch out for Trudy, she gets under your skin." In our minds the Fremen are women. The idea of variables in prescient (preseen) future(s) Herbert is a Sufi - his imagination is full of Arabic. For Luke - which is stronger, the emotion or the intelligent valor, ie which do I have to do more for? I am so flexible - and my mother - suggestible says the alpha training book, but it is in praise - the difference in intelligence in my ma and pa. "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water." "Trudy taught me all I know about fighting." Watch the level, ladies! The way - method - intelligence - of grief. Dignity - go see Candy - a troop. Is it time to use Luke to find out about childhood. "Trudy's mother is legendary." Cheryl angrily, "There isn't one who's a model." - The things Olivia has been onto - utopias, sci fi, madness. But. The alertness of Pat Thom. - She pried up my fingers to touch my nipples, when I was catatonic. "You're so passive. You're so passive. You were always so outright about what you are and what you need. It blew my mind." Do I remember right? Another picture for the legend. They take their turns. 2x2, testing attention, testing the tenderness out. And then they make a pillar - they do this! They put their arms around each other, right and left symmetrically (it is my part to feel the smallest of the back - the shoulder blades) and then they put all three of their mouths together. And make like snails. Yum. Listen baby, if I had been attached to that attachment for its own sake, I would not have been here. Right? Trudy caught one - "What did you say" she said. So I told her, but this time aloud. - Speaking of smell: spice and spice-like harmonics. "Is that what Gertrude was talking about?" she said. The familiar sobs, turn into full sobs, break out too. They stop and attend to me, it has begun like pleasure. C lies on top of me, but she taunts Trudy, "Did you take this woman to heaven? What did you do to this woman, did you take her to heaven?" "How many people do you cry for?" Idolatry. The reverend mother test - she changes chemistry - ie it is a test of technique, what is happening here - she makes a catalyst - at the molecular level! An exact transubstantiation. The redheaded man at Avignon, who said "They are not what you thought" and read me right. - gom jabbar, aba (as in djell-), graben He plays with language patterns to make us understand his inventions perfectly - chanty - palmary - maula pistol - stilltent - sietch - cielago (bat messenger) - hutment - kanly Trudy - she turns away cautious - "I am not that kind of person" she says - she lives like Tony Nesbit, no clothes, no decoration - she is not sentimental - she simplifies Cheryl - she praises ("What you wrote is very beautiful"). Hal was right, those eyes when they were blurred and red from fatigue, she's physically more fragile - she stays there, she's distracted constantly like a swarm of mosquitoes - she called Cheryl to her by touching herself - they know each other so well - she maintains her pretense of wanting me in order to keep Cheryl tantalized. Is the man really a catalyst in conception? In the sense that his mind doesn't inform the body of the baby? Miscalculations in his plotting - we are always embarrassed for him when he pretends Paul might die - it is amateurish. How I used to be afraid of David's eyes [David Cooper]. Are people going to be afraid of mine? The way Pat Thom veils hers. We [three] are not afraid of them and we use them wonderfully. IT'S NOT SIMPLE riding the maker. The teacher drugs, the wilder gifts, still teach and give nothing beyond the quality of their resonator ie the historical ego - ie we do not go beyond ourselves. Therefore food, physical culture, education and beyond all (it's true) breeding, matter. Dune 1965 - what a long time ago. - When law and duty are one (as in religion) you never become fully conscious. - A night in each place. They are addicted. - I had already thought to use the blue-eyed - and here they are, my cut-out eyes. - In legend, the wonderful flexibility of those who know: when they come to their fate, they move more quickly than they know possible - and they extend themselves to accept miracles. So it was with Roy, my enemy. So quick but so stupid. (He was.) (I was.) Learn to detect and head straight for either the strongest or the weakest part of who's there. The lieutenants Listen my soldiers, it doesn't stop there, we play our parts too well, and there'll be more nights when we confuse ourselves, just so that we can come out again to this joy of clarity which means that we've been tested. My ladies: there's no one could stop us. There's no one else. But can we be doing something beyond testing the rudimentary loyalties of cunt-access? You are not going to lose each other. You are not going to lose your long knowledge of each other. If you don't wise up and stop playing with each other on that level I am going to decide that you are using me to make your marriage more exciting, and I'm going to stop. "We're going to be friends for a long time." Trudy said that. We did meet for the first time, last time. The first time personally. Learn to hear what is meant and not what is said. There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than a man. For a woman the situation is reversed. Dear Carmichael - help me to learn precisely what liberties I can take - at last we are going to meet as grown-ups. a word tension directly opposite to adab The politics = I am stronger because they are addicted and I am not; I am stronger because betweentimes I am alone. [draft of cunt release poem] "But my sex is still tied to you in some way," and Nellie blushed. - Angel movie - quotations from poets, murmurs laid over each other in accents like the poets' voices - German accent, and in other languages. Das Magnet ist ein Urphänomen. - Partly I've been losing interest in El Yep because what she's best at, even, seems such a partiality and so blind - the connections don't go far enough. Were we in a trance state that good night? I think so. Is reading a trance state, and so, easily forgotten? [notes about biofeedback not transcribed] If they had been there during my labour, I'd have had them as extended consciousness. When I train myself I have to remember the beauty of my override as it has worked so far. "You go so far away." "You're so passive." - When I was looking at Cheryl, her face turned into a series of men's faces, most of them diabolic, with beards and shaggy eyebrows. I was remembering discovering visualization - building the birdhouse - we were still in the old house. Telephone as psychic instrument - sort of meter - real test if no one knew your number. Lorine, heavy, slow-voiced, raring, her face is almost brutal, the features so small and such an unformed mass around them; but then she has solidness and capability, she has authority which (for her age) makes me feel fluffy. She's heavy. She doesn't smile when she doesn't want to. Nellie is being faithful to her! The truth of this is my loneliness when I saw them together, and when Nellie couldn't stay and when she made an awkward deal of reassuring me. It made me feel my loneliness in relation to T and C, C and T, Co Ltd who are allowed to go home together. And Nellie goes back to Lorine. This loneliness has been away. Where has it been, and does it mean I have to call them? No. Nellie has been around a lot. - Angels tape. Engeln movie. Anges. Ideen den Engeln. What slides do I have? Can I have. Ideas of Angels. What kinds of ideas do angels have? Make it ambiguous. (Clearly ambiguous.) Luke wants to know: do wet birds fly at night? face-dancer In the Dune books people say what they know will not be believed; why do they speak (we speak) - something, we believe, is transmitted. ghola - reconstructed dead friend - how much can be changed and the person still be the same? The pleasure of questions set his thoughts into the counterbalance poise of the mentat Last night Luke saw a disk standing up, about 3" across, with writing on it - he couldn't read the writing. Earth is too present in this one. Book feels like decay from the beginning, suddenly accept Paul's end. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not yet, I occurred. The kwisatz haderach - "a being filled by the spectacle of Time" A music conductor who dances music out of players. Karen sad today that the pill spoils color vision. It's true that her house doesn't have color. How I can always hear insincerity in language. Is that why I couldn't talk about the Co-op on radio? How I read faces and bodies. Bernstein talks of musical value in terms of emotional immediacy - he says atonal music is of value when it conveys precisely the atonality, the longing for tonality, the being cut-adrift. Bernstein himself has a voice and tone as sincere as I can imagine. radiated a charismatic alertness War possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination. - Suddenly it's C again, drunkenness and in it the direct reach to the wrist, and rotating around it; "This thing is here;" oh knife, oh being, stranger, metal, oh unsmiling minimal, it's here again and I'm longing for you again; and your shadow, your addiction, my twin, gadwoman and hesitation, whose slightness in itself gives to the hands / undeniably. Beautiful two, locked together like arms of a fairground ride, dizzying; and you can unlock your gazes for the second-fractional time / jolt of inertia - on your way to reversals. Yes I am calling him in to help me. But I need more, I need Nellie and that satisfaction of opening in confidence oooh-oooo - Dune Messiah is really about the ghola, trying in its reconstructed flesh to reconstruct the person who had been erased. - A blankness because I can't see ahead except for unsatisfied hunger. Neither of them will have me. The fog of repression will keep coming down on me, and I will be left holding a shoulderblade like a hardback, a wrist like a bottleneck, while their whole souls fly out to meet apart from me. It's a grief. I haven't forgotten how they crowd and addict each other. And yet: to open them like sarcophagi and guitarcases (should I fast from metaphor and see whether it's possible to feel I'm thinking?) and crawl in with them and close the lid and be enclosed. - Dreamed us - with gestures [sketch] at the shoulder, to signify our latent and coming power, as three. Trudy was strong in the dream, which signifies angels also. The form of thought in dreams - images like evidence, given again and again, until I've got it. - 10. They are patient and faithful, they're sweetly precisely passionate, they are willing and / idle. Dreamed my dead Grandma Epp not petulant not ill not dizzy - looking into my eyes out of a young face within her old one - she turned to the sink, tall old frame, and began to sing in a high soprano, coming out powerfully sometimes and hesitantly betweentimes. (I remembered my father saying that she had a beautiful voice.) I rushed away crying. What does Luke feel when I am obsessed with sex? What difference does a 'satisfied' mother make to a child - does it leave her/him in latency? Was my sexiness as a child because Mother was raving horny? (Was she?) I lay next to Luke last night telling him a story I had interrupted my coming to tell, and he said "My penis is hurting." "Did you lie on something?" "No, I lay on it." Cheryl's tarot - the first card was 3 swords (sword being intellect) and a knight lying under them in contemplation - the 3rd (crossed) was 1 cup (love) shining out. The highest card you could have she said. On the left the High Priestess, on the right the Queen of --- [pentacles probably] (T and E), for domesticity. There was the woman with the lion. Another card was 3 cups knocked over and 2 standing, with a figure turning away. I've seen her face contract inward - when am I ever going to know her; I've seen her face contract inward so that her mouth puckered - both of them have small thin mouths and kiss the same, it's true as in my dream that I seem to lose the mouth (Nellie's was the same as mine). The blast of fright I get from her body, as when we stood and nearly touched our cheeks. When I met C before, I was meeting them both. When I meet her now I see how they separate functions. Cheryl is passion and Trudy is reason and both of them are so smart it's unnatural. My loyalty scurries, afraid of accidentally making a choice. No choice must be made. But in truth I have chosen, more than once. (As they have? It scares me more to think of being chosen than it does to think of being excluded.) On the last night, Cheryl and I were closed in together and I was starting to move freely and sing, when suddenly C stopped and said Trudy! I lay stunned and shuddering between them while they made their adjustment. I put my mouth to Trudy's nipple and felt her feel it, and she had her hand on my jeans crotch seam, and we hung onto each other's mouths, and yes we had found each other. And we stopped. "There are no rules!" cried Cheryl. But there are careful adjustments and we are patient and willing. My darlings, my skin friends. Then when Cheryl wanted to do the same with me, I couldn't find it, I was detached as if I'd had a secret. We took time and moved slowly but Trudy came and went and I felt an unsuccessful entertainer. And then Cheryl lay stunned, blue veins in her thighs. I was mood-matched with Trudy (who also last week was very high). For the first time, coming to Cheryl's house, I felt less than completely given. Is there a mechanism in me that feels I've been unfaithful to her? Because yes Trudy and I are finding each other and that is even harder than if we were courteous half-rivals. It does bewilder me. Later on will we be able to meet two by two also? - Sexual freedom says Octavio Paz, is the right to choose to be intoxicated (or not). Paz - a landscape always refers to something else, a metaphysic, an idea of human and cosmos. Modernism and the future being the clichés of the present time. "An art which demands of the receiver the sensitivity and imagination of a performer, who like the musician of India, is also a creator." Everybody is an erotic metaphor and the meaning of all these metaphors is always the same: death. The wo/man inspired, the wo/man who really speaks, does not say anything personal. Language speaks through her mouth. Poetry does not redeem the poet's personal self; it dissolves it in the more powerful reality of language. In spontaneous expression, we have at our disposal only one verbal structure, which categorically excludes any other structure supposedly possessing the same meaning. Andre Breton Language as base of social relations Metaphor is the primordial form of speech. Language cannot antedate society because it implies the existence of social relations. For T: "The poetry for the future will be oral. A collaboration between speaking machines, and an audience of poets, it will be the art of listening to messages and combining them" says Paz. Writer's morality is her behavior toward language. That's all. In poetry, technique is another name for morality: it is not a manipulation of words but a passion and an asceticism. The false poet speaks of himself almost invariably in the name of others. The true poet speaks with others when s/he talks to herself. Open and closed poems: reader closes the one and opens the other. To discover the meeting point between speaker and listener. This point is the heart of language. The Word has its roots in a silence previous to speech - a presentiment of language. Silence, after the Word, is based on language - it is an encoded silence. - The sudden garden behind [874] Georgia St. Jan Abbey's house. The grapevines. Protected land. An artichoke, alone. A pine tree - how much does it cost? Rocks. Fence. Poet as experimenter - what is happening here, does it work - risks their spiritual wholeness to find out things. Poetry is a form of experimental knowledge. The temptation of drugs, Baudelaire said, is a sign of our love for the infinite. - invocation of the cunt, a coax
- Our Co-op meeting: Maggie, Barbara, Karen, Madeleine, Phyllis, Paula, Judy, Judith. The presence of them all, Paula for instance in her long orange dress and big hoof clogs, maroon - Judith bent forward feeling outward with her round glass eyes - pushing them forward - quick strokes of editing, "no and, start with we" - Maggie keeps trying - C and T, and these - what are we doing? Do we care? Are we really remaking our cultures? We can work out of our experience and our community with each other, but what experiences are we giving ourselves, and what form of community are we using each other for? What's the erotic for? Intimacy. Love. Confusion. It is support but also undermining. I feel bad with Nellie now, as if it was all a silly froth and self destruction which has come to nothing, that can no longer can be honest about itself without ending all connection. I'm afraid for Luke, I don't want him to lose her. The intoxication has moved on, it seems. Stephanie [Judy]'s piece about the tent set in Maine wildflowers leaving a flat area; then next summer she drives all night to come to see what her friends have summoned her to see: a perfect rectangle of Maine wildflowers in their backyard. I love to think of her finding the ecstasy worth driving all night for. What specifically is our erotic going to be for? We don't have big enough beds. I'd like to just sleep with you, and wake up in the morning like overnight kids. Special breakfast and talk about art and old days. All the stories shared. My project is still to learn to pay attention. - I am blanked out, I can't think of either of them without being afraid to slight the other, I have been done in, or my fantasy has.
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