| dames rocket 4 part 3 - november 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
"Ellie I'm really into summarines now. I'm really interested in how they look." I attend to their bodies when I can with a joy I do not feel in them [in relation to mine]. 'doing work' 'working on' William Raban's show Broadwalk, filmed in Regent's Park. Each frame 20 sec time exposure v rich color, a lovely interrupted existence of those who pass. "The time of the whole day is there." Soundtrack - the footsteps, replayed on stereo, divided, recombined. - T "Every time you die something really does die." Angle of incidence - angles of a window frame done in double - there's a projector drift that develops between the two so that they go out and things happen later. Silent. Moonshine - 2-screen time exposure beautiful color of rising moon, 2 screen same but separate. One in which optical track is made from the image, which is black or white super of screens at different angles doing optical things, a structure appears inside it. William Raban dir Broadwalk 1972, Angles of incidence 1973, and Moonshine 1974 rings on water
A story that can begin anywhere - let loose a present time and follow one picture after another into another time the bed lifts with a little stir of covers it settles in another room. The telephone also lifts the room with it into another room where another voice cries out its apprehension. I didn't forget. No. The décor, two clocks voices. What's this little pot limed white it has flowers with transparence like leaves', the stem too, all of them show through to water. Patience. - We are fish upheld and supported on all sides. We lean confidently and harmoniously upon our element. We move in all dimensions and whatever course we take, the mighty waters out of reverence for our virtue change shape accordingly. Dinesen neumes Weil - the Beast is social idolatry That hair was too conscious of itself, it preened, it floated, it was beautiful. She lived in relationship to it as to a beautiful lover who disturbed her possession of herself. Wanted to become a martyr, a sheer being, bare in the street, a clown face where everything shows. [this was when I cut my hair off] - Agnes Martin - her simple notebooks, writing about lying in bed every day until it is clear to her what her work must be, says the work is to live without pride or fear; "going on without resistance or notions is called discipline" - "but helplessness, when fear and dread have run their course as all passions do, is the most rewarding." Helplessness most rewarding but perfection most efficacious. To make "an atmosphere of freedom"
Well dear M, as usual it's not want of writing but of sending that left you so long without a letter. It was a letter that was hard to send. (If you think it's a hard letter you should read the ones my friend Cheryl sends her mother - no, not always sends, sometimes just writes and throws away.)(But the ones you write back are better than her mother's.) There have been beautiful and hard things happening here. I am deep into a sort of family life which does me deep good and pleases Luke very much: two extraordinary friends, and their friends and children. The friends I've needed forever, two women as passionate as me - fierce bright people full of incandescence - but they know how to be friends, they know how to look after their friends in a way that amazes me and makes me think I've always been an orphan (but to have such a big Jewish family, oh my how intense they are and how you do have to fight for your privacy - ). Cheryl was 31 in August, she makes movies (that's how I found her) and does other kinds of art work, has a sense of language I admire very much. She lives with Zoë, who's seven - Zoë also lives half time with Don, who's Cheryl's close exhusband and a musician - Luke gave his heart straight over. And Trudy, who was 31 on the 6th of March (yes) but in 1945 she was in New York and Cheryl was in Montreal, and we arrived one day around the same kitchen table in Vancouver. Trudy works at drawing and friends, and her closest family is Rhoda who's been there since she was seventeen. And around these four there's a community of mothers and artists and a swarm of affectional life that is like a dizziness to me sometimes. They pay good attention to each other. The poster is self explanatory: our show is over now but it gave the Co-op its first strong public existence, it gave me my first public exposure too, I had some of the collages and a poem in it - and my movie is out too, doing well, going places by itself. The Pacific Cinemateque has bought a copy and will give it a public screening in December. It's been shown around other places too, and - wow! - now it's time to make another. I'm sorry your times are so hard. It doesn't seem right that you shouldn't be able to do what you're made for. Susie Ksinan is having lunch with me tomorrow. Her father died just now. We went to see Grandpa and Grandma, I'm sure they've told you. Nellie was with us and enjoyed them. My wild hair is all cut off an inch from the skull. I'm new. Nellie is taking Luke skating every week. The photograph is to replace one of those sweet girls you have on the wall above the piano - this daughter does something and is 31 not 19 and it might as well be a part of the story, which didn't stop, after all, with childhood. Love and wishes - - Presence. Cherly and I sinking and rising, in the morning wrapped in a quilt on top of the cape next to the telephone cold and cramped by walls in the corner of the corridor, laughing and hugging - walking on railway tracks and growing dread of voicelessness - and regaining, and losing, and drinking brandy. Sitting in the railway carriage with an expensive mink woman. The way Cheryl is loved in the world. "They love my madness and don't ask me for what I can't ..." - Ran into the invisible blade of a saw. Big toothed disk, a wood saw, screaming into the log. Paying Trudy's tax on all the gentleness I got, my mistake. Like Paul she punishes me for her own confusion. And it's her way of telling me she finds me diminished without my hair. Cheryl phoned to know if Trudy was here, after that it was charm only. Anticipation. Trudy no longer claims she's in love with me, stupid lie that it was, then Cheryl has a sudden freedom from her lie and also punishes me for it, then both of them rediscover the fun they have warring with each other, and I'm defined as the heavy unlettered stranger they had an excursion with (an aboriginal) and both of them are guilty. Trudy campaigning shamelessly against Cheryl. "You're not in love with each other, I don't see that." I'm wounded and the writing is lame. You don't know how to make a truthful gentleness. Narrowhead plaid snake - "I know what I have to give you. You interest me. I can reveal you to yourself." "I got turned inside out." What could follow that? A new life. A lie, a rest. "She gave me a lot of latitude at first, I lapped it up." "I know it's dangerous." "I didn't know, I lapped it up." Crazies and lonlies grizzlies, ponies New Portuguese letters If in my heart I do not believe in love as a totally genuine feeling apart from my imperative need to invent it (in which case you are real but I am not), I nonetheless refuse to deny it, since it truly does exist in and of itself: a vice, an urgency, a precipice, whereas you are scarcely more than a motivation, a beginning, a garment in which I envelop you, woven of my much greater pleasure at feeling myself moved by passion than in loving you, a cloak for involving me in my much greater pleasure in saying that I love you than in really loving you. And so I suffer, apparently because I love you, but in reality because I am losing the motive that will sustain my passion. Despite your complaints that you are suffering terribly, you are benefiting much more from your passion than I am (enriching yourself, becoming more human, gathering new strength from it, you maintain) and that is why you love me. My only benefit is the attention you pay me, the use I have made of it to fight against my loneliness, the escape you force on me each day. - The rhetoric, rheterotic of these hysterical three who are stuck in their attraction to one another without learning to try it out, and so they think fucking is a freedom. - I am looking to find which one is me. Maina, Mariana, Maria Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho Da Costa 1975 New Portuguese letters Gollancz In Oporto, when I was all by myself and hoping to learn to love the city with another (and hence through this discipline of waiting for someone with whom to help create it, of learning truly to love it?) the scorching smell of your armpits Once hesitant sisters, each of us adorning ourselves in our own feathers, one of you in lyrical, emotional outpourings and eroticism, the other of you in analytic distance, and I in ironic detachment, each of us the prisoner of her pretended strength, in the heat of what was happening we found ourselves touched by, revealed in the common childhood that we made it our task to discover, sharing our grievances with each other, and in so doing gaining the courage to accuse and suspect each other, going on from accusing our mothers to accusing the other to our faces, and discovering that we could tolerate this - and that this how we made each of ourselves the mother and the daughter of each of the others, and sisters determined to talk about precisely why we were orphans and suffering and destitute. A family. All this linked in a chain, each of us intermingling and trying on forms of the others, as though attempting to possess each other, and succeeding in so doing, each of us impregnating first one and then the other of the two in turn. the one of us who never used to analyze things now does so very well, the one of us who had never written poems now began to write them, the one of us who had never bothered to use eye makeup now does so. The one who almost never wept, who never got upset, now does. Each of us the pupil of whichever one of us could best teach what each of us needed to learn. Sad tropics, the heat of the body, a sad anthropology, that of the convents and barracks in us. But this is not the house of pairs. Poor, poor couples who are only two! Three is the beginning of the true history of equal partners. Each one of us a third link - the door to the City, to the street, to others. I have also pondered how we have deliberately put an end to everything that served to allow us to forget or to compensate for what we never had in the family of our childhood - as though in this, in this work and time of familiness lay our only possibility and access to our very roots, to the bone of our pasts. Listen, my sister, the body. Now only the body leads us to others and to words. There is no one better than you or me, Mariana, no one better than thirst, the spasm of ecstatic pleasure; o silk, o soft, soft skin, o fear and yet more fear, with nothing kept secret and no artful tricks. I see you in the night/day of your book in a bright red dress, at times furious with others, at times self absorbed, at times voracious, and I feel your hostility - toward what? Toward the death in me, toward what was one day forever begun and has not yet been ended, toward this sort of apathy or a sort of mesmerized impatience that overcomes me when I see the energy with which you take control of everything and moisten it with something that is warm and vaginal, flowing down over the dry rod, the narrow haunches that you celebrate in verse, not wanting to destroy them. Why did you choose me to exorcise yourself of yourself / of us? You're like my mother and love only the other one of us. But the other, the one with the serene face, also shares our lives. How peaceful and warm it would be for me to be able to speak of the two you's as a single you, and now that I have written/said this, it seems to me that I can do so. Without faith like you, my one sister, who have faith in nothing, and without determination like you, my other sister, without your magnificent body, my one sister, and without your magnificent face, my other sister. Can it be, my friends and sisters, that I am becoming a phantom at your/our command? Few will be chosen to bear the curse of freedom, which consists of using savory words, having an inquisitive mind, a carefree heart, and light touch. Beauty does not lie in acceptance; it lies in suspending judgment and keeping one's distance. the woman withdrawing from her body so that it may be used and explored without personal resistance Growing tired of you was the greatest risk confronting me. Narcissism These Portuguese letters come to me through Paul, who said "erotic writing, as all of your writing is. There is even a red snapper in it." Only their own voices interest me, the rest is pretext and not information. - The telephone was cut off today. I forgot an appointment with Susie. Also I shot 100' each of perfect music - the museum's blinds and the conservatory windows. [Current shot at the Museum of Anthropology]
Wire mesh, with mirror behind, downtown there's a formation, when you're moving past it you see nothing, stopping you're there behind the foreground. Dazzlement, drunkenness - I saw Cheryl in her kid gloves so gestured with money, drunk - when she was imperial gaiety, I shrank back resentful, subservient. Both of you were so beautiful, when you were sitting together. Eaten, eaten, bitten. How could I see it and not want it. Paul playing, telling me half-sincere that he secretly believes I'll find out one day that it's him I love. He can say so and laugh. A wart appearing on my hand. The massed universe of self-doubt that waits in the stone, in the drunk. If I was drunk and stoned more would I get through. Sheer admiration, it's hard. The question, as with Roy, is whether I can bear the inferiority in me that we create together as the price of my 'love,' my gaping. There's no satisfaction to find. All that is asked of me is presence, they say. I ask myself for assurance of equality. I cannot bear to be the initiate (you and Rhoda should be together, you're so right and profound together), the powers I have haven't made the house of friends into their image, and I enter the house of other powers, where I am a phantom.
Anguish, an anguish on the account of the old thing, the awe and helplessness - it is that underneath it both Trudy and I are 'in love with' Cheryl, and struggle against our infant - the way we are in love with her has to do with class - in the stone last night I saw her as the prince, it is her princeliness we covet for ourselves - the refusal ("Cheryl never yawns, have you ever seen Cheryl yawn?" - then I remembered she does it with her nostrils). ("Then I thought, yes, I do want to know what Cheryl is doing.") Drunk, they emerged into a joy in each other - "There's such respect!" I cried.
The original situation: courting, the Courted. It isn't only her refusal that makes me love her. She simply is amazing ("You've let me see her in such a way that I can leave her"), so fluid and so quick; but when she 'loved' me how she shrank herself.
turns Clarity, grief, grief, sleeping out the time of grief. Is it my turn to be wide awake. Terrible anguish of incompletion, the woman with a hole in her temple, size of a penny, Silvie, color, sunken, depressed, a trapdoor, a trepanning. I'm so jealous of their comfort. The self absorption I told them the story: x and y are secretly in love with z, and they know it, but it's for partly bad reasons, having to do with their self-hater and so on, and they fight it in themselves in every way they can. "How does z feel about it?" "Oh z has her pains and they're real but basically she's flourishing." T and I: complicity, fellow feeling, a tenderness between those with the same hole in us. Me too: flourishing, but in distress, we both sacrificed our hair to her! I sacrificed my beauty to her, to make it easier for her to win! A treachery, or else a mysterious faithfulness to support what is nearer to the perfection we imagine. They were gone without warning.
If I take myself back to the beginning and don't allow hope or despair I'm left committed to myself - that is the other message of the black angel of lost love - either commitment to fail or commitment to grow. Only a little had to be withdrawn for me to fall backward into loneliness and clarity -
Don't deny that we have ways of measuring each other's powers (in relation to our own) very exactly. encamped along the hills of light before the angels shall know his name confessed in heaven We suffer each other's lies, waiting for the time they'll be told, or untold. Oh help me she cried across the table to her friends, I'm feeling religious. Everything that's too small, pushing ourselves. -
Imagine a 'body' of work made simply to preserve power in the hardest meetings It is the test of my life (or: I want it to be). Jan Abbey's face and house, and 8 weeks baby making a fat stomach ("I think it's a girl because this pregnancy feels so different from any I've had before. With the others I always knew exactly how the person was developing but with this one I feel who is this?") - in the visit, the dark house - there were stories. The Tibetan lama who interpreted her explanation of rosehip tea as sadness for the death of the rose (in the hot season when roses would die in a few hours) made a mumbo jumbo around the pink rose with a single drop of dew, so that the rose, and its drop of dew, were intact for two weeks, the nannies coming in, mornings, to see if truly it was still alive. "It's like setting a table and waiting for the guests to materialize," this about making the jealousy movie. The Tibetan music - some chamber players in the back, and some cows - in twilight - the lowing of the Tibetan horns. She is anxious, exploited, burdened with children, but brilliant. Also vindictive - wants to make the jealousy movie (which I've already made) to bring herself out into the world - my movie made her want to make the movie she'd imagined I'd made. The house of short journeys The woman with a hole in her head let herself out of it on a fine line like a vapour trail, she bridged herself, angled, levered, herself into an existence, adjacent - the places she goes - what begins in pressure ends in journeys - a fine white line thrown out and grabbing continents of existence, she has her own gateway, she always goes home. Could write collages of tape recorder and fantastic. When my soul leaves, is it really somewhere else I don't know about. Collecting material for dreams. Relations in objectivity. Something to share - being sure to have. The tale needs a turn. - Nellie's perfume, but no heat. I could wear it. It came to this: resistance. "You take it" she says "but you don't give me your taking of it." "There is a technical problem" I say, "it is that I cannot believe my taking of it is an equal gift and I do not want to take without knowing that what I give makes a balance. Otherwise your giving is like a power lever that makes me feel small." (And addicted.) "You're talking about jealousy and envy" she says. "People have resisted what I have to give them until I no longer see them and can't give them anything." "Watch yourself" she said, "watch your voice, watch what it does to people." "I know I have a phoney voice," I say, not wanting to seem the pupil. Not wanting to seem the pupil but being the pupil. "And watch your mind too" she says. "Don't you think I've been watching my mind ever since I was little!" I exclaim. I tell myself meantime, yes, what a good idea, I will. Also I have been. "I do acknowledge" I say. "You say 'Yes I know that already, I always knew that.'" "But I did know it." "You saw it, your seeing it makes it different." Do I have to accept you as my teacher. Wanting to be equal. Trying is dying. "Your taking is equal. You could show me what I give." "It forces me to try to compete in seeing you." "My friends know how to find me. I teach my friends how to find me." Maggie's resistance and how it stopped me.
Out of the polarization "I haven't seen the person who made the film. That sense of structure in time."
Trust vision to yes and no right. Not that. Yes that. Driven into a corner by unselfness.
Conversation I support by saying what they say in another way. The metalanguage, the overtongue. Gass says Human Nature - time, memory, habit, identity - is different from Human 'mind' (says Stein says). "Normally, we see like an animal." "I am not I any longer when I see."
The reward of difficult thinking is joy. Virtuosity of words. Gertrude Stein 1936 The geographical history of America Random House Localization, identity insistence. T makes herself the confessor, to whom I want to bring my sins of grief. C more aboriginal than I, makes less connection between her times and people and doesn't 'stay in touch'.
Any cell - man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect - given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it. Cytoplasm will flow easily from one to the other, the nuclei will combine, and it will become, for a time anyway, a single cell with two complete, alien genomes, ready to dance, ready to multiply. Lewis Thomas 1974 The Lives of a Cell: notes of a biology watcher Bantam - Movement parallax Rhoda's movie. Trudy with long hair writing a letter. Trudy opening a door again and again. Somebody's theory, that our work, as termites' work is building, is making language, and it's true among those of us who do work - How language would mutate if parts isolated. The human brain is the most public organ on the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. Label bits of thought with tracers The brain used and played like a console. If I want to exist there I have to bring a good structure. "It is done by simply passing the bits around from mind to mind, until something like natural selection takes place" - I wrote that years ago. Mutant minds - process differently. To stay alive you have to be able to hold out against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy, and you can only transact this business with membranes in our kind of world. Meteorites pounding the atmosphere, inaudible sound of rain on the roof. The mirror movie, C with T in the round mirror above her head. For a flash at the end T with C in the mirror. That C.
The white fog these days darkening and lightening the day with itself. November's nature. I want C to have the sense of justice T has. She's not that. What makes me impotent is that I can't count on her to tell me what she knows. With you I have to bring a vigilance that strains me (but T and C could fuck because T knew how), I have to be Andy in some way, the good provider, who knows what's happening - silence is how she says yes. Two obtuse people. Rhoda - "You'll have to work harder than that for my friend Rhoda" - C and R biting deep, T looking blasted, very worried - C given a gaiety by R who supported her mischief against T's reprimands. R came and sat close in a new joy that T and C broke with a bicker and R told us to leave and with authority. The girls. R's embrace at the door, little person, little back, I was instantly interested to see who she was. She backed off and grabbed C again at the door - C getting royal off it and R getting sad, C getting off on power all evening especially by my exclusion but I stayed near and didn't care except to make my dumb little bows from time to time - hail Cheryl full of grace you sure know how to hold out don't ya. Get yr power where you can. R wanting projects. Judith (R is not flourishing) talking about movies. "What is it you can do with moving reality" she says. I say you make time with it. She wants to demonstrate things.
The assurance that when I go there Trudy will be exactly there catching every try. Heavy silence of people who can do it. It is a reliable love. Upstairs from the party, Candy humble in her body but herself and fresh in her mind, telling her pain, giving her eyes. Getting into people. Our solved grace after it, and they went home which made me miss them but which was right for a change. The times when Luke bespeaks me, I don't usually believe at first that he's said what he did. It's not far off telepathy. Does it relax the face? (Lessing.) Meet me! cried Roy. I have so much! cried Cheryl. Dreams last night, Cheryl in them was always evading. What Cheryl did when she challenged me to fight was she stopped Trudy doing what she was doing so extraordinarily (C has learned it from T) in order to do something herself (beat me up) - when T and I called her on it T was enraged, C was abashed and even apologized, she was up against a wall, and forgiven. It was me who announced what she was doing. The way I make room for other people to expand.
When Cheryl wrestled me I was without a chance of knowing where I was she simply vanquished me by force of her will which was fury to be as good as Trudy. There's her weakness, I thought and wasn't ashamed to come and search in her affrighted face to find the focal point a place behind the face as if a spot as if the pineal where you are. Candy startling out of her silence, "Where can I find you?" to Trudy. We felt it as big as it was. The suffering radiance on her face later on. She got beatific. Someone else being the aboriginal. After tasting the pleasure of being smart who could refuse to have it again. Concentration - music. [log of waterpipe angel audiotape made earlier] What makes it impossible is that I now love and look to Cheryl more than she feels me ("I want you" I say on the phone, and she says uhhnng in her expensive voice, "But, you know, I can't imagine doing that"),(C is playing me now) and having given her a little power and Trudy having given her some. Her symbolism of wanting to wrestle me down. The thing in her that wants to obliterate the other. Last time what happened was I gave it up, met C by accident and she was attentive and loving, an eruption of such love - why was it - but without her wit in it - that was before she got Trudy back - she spent money conspicuously - and because that happened Trudy was angry with me and took her back - then there was the weekend I was completely bled by her will - no one on my side - then Trudy deserted. What was there at the beginning was a set-up. What was there at the beginning was a refusal by her of my good faith. She played for power from the first. One time she was soft and loving. What was there was a dark lonely hungry and angry passion in me. It is true that all my gifts have come from Trudy. (But: her arrogance. Her arrogance. Her power base!) Except the original gift of a vision of desire. I would have to see her in a new way. ("You've let me see her in such a way that I could let her go.") "Trudy works hard for me! You don't work for me at all! I don't work for you either." "You can't want somebody to want you" she said, "don't you see you can't want somebody to want you." "Trudy is in my life in a way you can't be." Every time I give her up she comes on loving. - The minute I see her I am caving in, in love and admiration simply for her beauty as an object, her small movements, the cut of her eyes. I love her object. Her person diminishes and humiliates me. I rebel. Josie and Paul are willing to empower me. Trudy is watching and balancing. Now it is Trudy in the middle. I look for her. And there's Trudy beautiful Trudy gleeful in her fur collar. Play and tragedy and such compassion possible. It was so easier, with Josie having something for me at the same time. Oh I want to write her inch by inch every part a hunger in the belly - "You know you can never have her in that way. You can never have me in that way either." We walked ragged all over the sidewalk, no more three striding. - Their great secular enjoyment - my witnessing gives it a polish - I'm not met - I'm not let in - Want to try to say some of what I saw on the day of the great stone. Zoe's birthday party 1976. What I see and feel, but mostly do not participate in, is the Mind playing - this mind that is so close by - it's the Work, they say, knowing exactly what is happening at any moment, being right on Time - Don not quite there and fat under his chin, for a while he and she sat touching knees like big Cats. I wasn't allowed from the first, but they'd been nice on the phone and I was coasting on it - Rhoda came, Carol, Renee, Daphne. I knew where she was, and Kit came to the door and Luke saw him and turned away to look at us with an abashed but completely revealed love and pleasure on his face - Kit played Lordy. Don sat on one side. All the postures all round the table. He bumped into me more than once. (They never bump.) When everyone was out of the room he put his head on my shoulder and said "Oh Ellie. It's unbearable." "What's unbearable?" He wouldn't say. "It's very fine" I said. But what did he mean. ("Do you and Don kiss on the mouth?" "Well ..." "Does he put his tongue in your mouth?" "Old habits." "That's disgusting." Glee and modest glee.) What they have is a specialization in debat, de bat, debate, report, reportoire, repartee, they are experts in riding the mind - the game of word - word - word - word. A mad room I go into at my own risk. I'm brave. Insist. They don't let anything get away from - "My grandma, she was fat, she would hold me very tight so I couldn't breathe, 'You're my favorite' she'd say.") Question nobody would answer. 1. When I'm not there Cheryl denies me - Trudy shouts at her for not saying the same to me. Puddles of tears. "I want only you" wept Cheryl to Trudy, and Trudy is holding out, because Cheryl is getting so strong. And so beautiful. And so beautiful. I married her, made her my fifties bride in high heels and a veiled hat on the dusty front seat of the Plymouth dressed in a tight skirt suit but exactly an animal, alert and present. Bright in the eyes, hard in the body. The body that the imagination engulfs. "You don't tell her that you want her and that's how you get her exactly where you want her, you've got her right under your skin." "I know about that" I say. "I see exactly how she does it, I have always seen it, I know exactly what it means, and it only works in flashes, it passes."
My next thing to invent games I can play. 2. "Did you see her face when you said that, she looked like a little girl." (C denies what I heard and says it was her.) 3. Coming and lying down pressing in. "I'll let you have 15 minutes alone if you let me have 15 minutes alone" [Trudy says]. "You're brutal" I say pushing her away, C doesn't come near. They are a spectacle, an entertainment, and I can't touch them it would be a blood sacrifice of groupie meat. - Why are they so mindless there? Started to bleed ten days early to catch up with C! Could smell myself at the table. These notes for the history of a day, like pulling hairs in a beard. 4. It's unbearable. What? "I'll see you, I don't know where" he said. 5. Rhoda, she's there but puffy in her face. She and Don have been looking sadly. She stands opposite looking cleft, bereft, I look, witness without letting up, and she raises her eyes for a flash, smiles odd. Breaks. I break hold. She's back. Two odd smiles. Gone. It came to me (smiling in the gropy candlelight) that I could do with her more unscrupulously by writing her in legend (as she is in me) in secret - is that any business of yours? And meeting her in public life as exactly who she is. 6. I was in bed being entertained, the witness in pain and pleasure of dissociation, they clowned acrobated (C balanced like the woman on the teeter totter) (drawing me on it with 2 dogs, they on the sideline - like Judy Williams.) Could do a movie of how they are. Paul you have to firm up if you're going to do me good. How to teach him. The praise that stops me. His unwillingness. You're / we're a resource. Work on him and Josie. She can. When they went to bed it continued through the night, I wrote the lines from that point, good I thought I can make it up just as well, but didn't imagine myself speaking. 7. The mystery of why they don't meet my visions, won't put themselves on some lines. Empowers them. 8. It isn't over, I can tell by how happy I am (the dissociation is true and dangerous but I can gather myself up). Do I really need more power now? Mascara. Joke. Don't you remember what happens in the deep stone, the way I am not allowed to exist - Rhoda sending them out for doing that to her. I exist when I see / why do I have to exist in personality. Needn't be preoccupied - put it somewhere else. Want to use power only in play and clearly. Concentrated food. Symbols and images of mind - abounding. She dedicates her space. My space is dedicated too. 9. Sneaking a vision of them in bed lying separate, wanting to look and refusing. Crazy days. 10. What do they actually see. Behavior. It all became behavior. "There's so much being said, it's unbearable" said T. Ellaquent. They talk about me among themselves, the visitation full of behavior. Many stories about the visitor.
T in her dreams has no animals only people, totally social. C is same, all of their work about presence of people. 11. T being moralistic: "Don't you think she deserves to know?" "What?" Mystification. "You don't put yourself on the line." ("We're here now," she evades.) She starts but doesn't hold onto it, her morality is a device for existence. They play excellent tennis but they are obsessed past what they need, security, play at security. You could be very fine if not for that indulgence. Get on with it. Unconscious. There's something going on that is outrageous but very fine. Which in relation to me is a brutality, but which I am not destroyed by. Ellie Epp exists and goes on existing. What's this. It is a brutality of lying, evading and using, of patronage; but it is not a brutality because everything nonetheless is very clear. - They deny it - what are they afraid of - to let me in. The tapes: I want to know who I am in these meetings. I listened to the tape and I realized that's not me. I stick close because there's something I'm getting. I was given a chance and refused to fight 'for' them because they are a couple. They are a couple such as I've never seen, what would happen if they admitted it? Demand to know. Get a Beaulieu. We seek ourselves where we are not to be found. I'm very accurate in those encounters, silent when it's true. Use, trust, throw myself out upon - 'myself' - ride the ridge - the line - the thread. Not to be afraid to hurt. Where I am everything is allowed, in my position. The kids and the cake, Zoe gathering herself to blow them out and getting them all. Carole staying out of it - in the way she does, very radiant. [Goy friends peripheral: Maxine Gadd, Carole Itter, Martha, Penny] A childhood in which no one is present: the world has a beautiful solidity and people are ghosts, the inner voice is driven into unconsciousness where it need not be, it is the nature of human to be present in a flood, a fuzz.
T plays morality for C; in truth loves the specialization it gives her, and cares no more for it than C does. Gaiety. Will sacrifice everything to fun.
Still, when there were fissures in the telephone talk, the fissures were full of fear and hurt; and she was the one who stretched in with something new to stop the hole. Holding the strings. I talk about context and sexuality. "Oh cummon Cheryl you can't con me that way now when I'm being so clear!" "I have a feeling you know things you aren't saying." 12. T: "We'll never get to see her like that Cheryl, she liked that person she was." About me talking to Daphne. "You were feeling your oats, in a literary way." "Everyone comes with their stories, and they tell their stories, and then they realize that everything is happening right there." Daphne was looking very stripped, funny faced and deep in her eyes. An old fashioned uprightness, the grey in her hair. She studies me too. We talked about journal. I blabbed my stories, it's true. She's so sober. The kitchen table form. Alert. Everyone visible, cup after cup of coffee and brandy, how could I wake feeling so fine. The form is that of sensing the assembled hunger. All of them wanting to be seen and loved, says T. The sense of shadow world very strong, woken up still stoned / she was in bed all warm and furry and while we talked about Ponoka and Essondale and tents and brown paper packages I sometimes had a little feel. Charlie Rheaume. Go back go back, the weeds at the side of the road. Giggling. Ooh lovely. There it was again the original, the first love. You. You! Tents! Oh, were you too just little, and in the grass with chairs and blankets. Stories. Oh, it isn't all of you met before. Your gaiety. There's room for me, when you will. Liddle kisses and imaginary feels. Regrouping so's she doesn't lose Trudy to me. Setting it up. Little pictures out of childhood / just samples. Rich rich riches.
The phone call weeks ago from the post office verifying an address - "Ellie Helen Epp" - La Glace Alberta, London England - it could only have been a detective for Student Loans - but how did they get my phone number and however did I not pay more attention at the time? So they're onto me but how - could only have been a private source. They must have thousands to pay such attention to. At Burghley Road they said I'd gone to Vancouver doubtless. After two years nearly. Costing them. Welfare? "A very covenish feeling in here." Rhoda's witchery. The eyes. Witches and I'm in danger of losing my soul or am I being taught. The sexual predators. Marie Claire Blais. Psychic development says Butler comes from building links between normal waking consciousness and the personal subconsciousness, through a barrier.
Eating "tends to close down the psychic activities and restore you to normal consciousness."
Josie's face when she said "and it's reassuring for me too, to know that when I'm sick, or ..." Diminish. C and how she refuses to diminish herself. C, the hurt, compile the evidence for. "Perhaps one day you will see my generosity." She looked and looked. So eager to believe. "Do you still believe that you love her more than she loves you? Tell me the truth. This is very important." - In sleep's furnace the body's water is gently chased. The body wakens sleeker. This beautiful connection. Do it gently, believe the news. -
The messenger. When I slept I looked for you. Welter of messengers. Benefactor. Woman of knowledge. I saw that they seem so far away because I do not bring myself near. Sense of danger. Where does it go - do you learn how to bring it back - is it really all there - The changes. The ... Understanding is it Does everyone go to the same place when you understand or are understood, how do you know. Is it a school? - Veils - veiled women
Black movie about veils Hole in her head. Closed down. Woman with eyes made of mother of pearl or abalone shell.
Paul and how uneasy he was with me in here, I saw how much I dislike him, the slime in him in spite of his qualities, a slime in his face - the greed - I should tell him - "good luck" he said about going to England - I said it was the flight I told him but who knows. There's a distortion in him an ugly unbearable warp. You have to tighten your life.
- Heavy isotopes - atoms with the same chemical properties but slightly heavier, eg heavy water evaporates less easily. Accumulates in body. Water gets kinetic energy from the atmosphere - movement and action. Except for tides. surface tension thermal qualities - slow to heat
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