| dames rocket 4 part 4 - december 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
We are instruments tuned in various ways, we have various ranges and capacities. 'To find ourselves' is a curious concept - to find a self, to make a self. Daphne on the telephone talking about Ponge, who writes prose pieces about things, 5 pages about a pebble. "If you find the resonance of the thing all the words connected to that resonance will flood up." I said "When you read you give people a tuning." She said "Oh, that's good to hear." Francis Ponge 1942 Le parti pris des choses / The voice of things - Philosophy is exclusively an affair of action and practice, difficult to write about in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running. Sensible matter - that is to say inert matter or flesh - is like a filter or sieve; it is the universal test of what is real in thought. Simone Weil 1970 First and last notebooks Oxford Unless thought becomes physical feeling it doesn't really work. The filter of materiality, gridded - Sufis: the physical world is the symbol and image of the spiritual world. a vocabulary of signs, a vocabulary of marks, a vocabulary of pictorially structured elements, which, brought together, would evoke certain states of feeling or states of mind - Dwoskin Tod und teufel, Trixie Steve Dwoskin Tod und teufel 1973, Trixie 1969 - [time and date for Luke's flight to England Saturday Dec 11 and mine on a different date] Robin's lecture [Daphne takes me to Robin Blaser's lecture at SFU]
- The issues are back here Limited versus developed social being An obsessive game of skill But also a little difference from the desperate privacy and repression of the Goy. A developed form. Wish I'd been there at the beginning. When Trudy came into the room Cheryl jumping on her and I say "We have to smell her, to see if she's of the species" etc - another form of limit. "You weren't there at all, everything you said was dead. There was no way to take it up."
The sensation of being flipped - Judy Ritter - traveling to watch the apocalypse, sense of death (she dreams stomach cancer), I imagine. Despair, she says. Radioactive cloud passing over, a complete dissociation from 'outside'. The sensation of having died and gone to heaven. A lucidity but a disembodiment. "A lovely and devoted companion" the one real thing. 13. (Jack Spicer) Built of solid glass. The temple out there in the weeds and California wildflowers. Out of position. A place where we worship words. See through into like it is not possible with flesh only by beginning not to be a human being. Only by beginning not to be a soul. A sole worshipper. And the flesh is important as it rubs itself into your soleness. Or California. A division of where one is. Where one is in a temple that sometimes makes us forget that we are in it. Where we are is in a sentence. Where we are this is idiocy. Where we are a block of solid glass blocks us from all we have dreamed of. But this place is not where we are to meet them. [Likely was 1975 The Collected Books of Jack Spicer ed and with commentary by Robin Blaser Black Sparrow Press] - Nellie said [meeting Trudy] "I was angry I'd gone, I didn't like the way she asked questions, I felt I had given a lot more than I got." What actually happens. Puns. Metaphor? Variations versions words and their shadows. [several pages of lyrics to Ferron songs] - Movie of sheets of glass simply winged.
About C: crumminess of the swallowed social voice. - Problems:
I actually could learn to write - London Film Co-op show [at Pacific Cinemateque] - Co-op is booming Portrait #2 - slow look at her objects, shells, horse, torn paper - showed us Cave aperture - each shot going back into a cave - the hole gets smaller - overlays v beautiful - done in camera, times when both exist together Tracking cycle - all the details of the room 2 frames per sec, making a sculpture in space Clouds - Walk - Still life with fruit
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- The childhood is repository of strong visions Creek and water various seasons - a four year story - the childhood black and white present green or mythology tinted A beautiful film carefully soundtracked Storyboard for angels - on cards - so they're for that too Key images dealt like cards - photographs laid down Budget photographic work Gas for miles, traveling expenses A little like Other side of underneath - need a place to lay out history of that place and time and people - oh expansion - tracking shots and all, off the back of trucks - license Research on the land of my birth Its cosmology - tape recorder in the car Stoned oh isn't it beautiful - the gas station, someone to drive through the dusty towns - forget about him - the old crow food, where it comes from Typewriter in a box - spending time in the farmer's land - price of this and that rising - find the people who never existed, drink and dance with the neighbours - fiddling hall - the kids - a friend - some friends More money is going to come A free movement up and down highways that have no traffic, the auction mart Images of pie and ice cream a documentary Traveler the kid finding a place to stay Box with equipment a location in the world Proust's Canadian country help me to shine a light on this location the love letters between young girls writing about he comes - an adolescent can be shot into it the photograph flashed up the diaries A plastic upstairs laid out not eaten by mice Beautiful world a girl's voice speaking a woman's voice speaking a real life restored Sense of ruins transcription of journals The old people a sense of transitory life seen from eternity clouds as high as that Intoxication and marvel shamanic stone Narrative separate from pictures Backward and forward a puzzle made to make you work at my childhood Photographs taken the ego making itself and then unmade of time and the river novel a hundred years later, things to see and how to see them, cleaning a lamp chimney - raises it lowers it - camera movement - lovers aren't necessary when there's another connection to cosmos - he speaks too, Luke, the voice of the sun 2 hour movie to show them where I come from remember dresses gestures photographs - light stand Careful record of the thing - tent - cooking - a narrative erotic thoughts of the young child a fresh spring for traveling, 2 children maybe Just a car. Do another for the Board. Vegetable gardens and others Lens for scale - filters for high contrast Maybe work printed for black and white and printed together black and white and color Traveling light
childhood present wild place the exact sense of it a helper? No just Myrtle or? Janeen a tape recorder hooked into the car just set it up - sync sometimes, clapper board or even super-8 for part blow it up a different quality want to do epics like Duras dope dope and other stuff too - yoga I can move hitchhike there and back trip to England to print find resources the vision that will grow a bigger life as well as the woman writing as well the angel variations the harmony of this handwriting the volatile of memory memory ride with me strangeness - the moonlit car time exposure the man crosses the road from one shadow to another - shoot it and then get an editor, production stills first that place and then another - put F into it other people's photograph albums - get people to act out slightly pompadour hairdos the young men directing action get sense of movement study sound study effects - eclect of technical language being made (C is a phantom bride, T is a phantom friend a beautiful craziness arriving brilliance allowed body felt her knee even when it didn't touch me sending in fat ropes of hot energy a heat all up the left side - incandescence - a white dwarf hot dense bright - bright dark of black diamond and cola, glass, I held out a flange against it and pushed it back into her, did that like breathing, letting it in, pushing it back. Absorbing couldn't tell how she could let go of it and joke with Mark was he easiest to talk to he and Diana, "Well Ellie what do you think" said Rhoda shrilly. "Wow." Nervous laugh. "You're easy to please." Nothing to say to that, puts her head down toward her knees the pen's slippery path, invention of the ballpoint great difficulty slow improvements to make the fat skiing done so easily, in buttery round letters. Such a girl so young and pretty fifteen / fired Bright / red cheeks bright eyes a gloss I must have it is possible to be the bride too, take years don't play fair the affair never took place except for accidents - we've been careless - it's not your friend - crazy language collect some Jets going over to the Saskatoon Hill army base at night - reconnaissance Grande Prairie Herald Tribune archives Nellie offering her fat tit to field [feel] and I showed her mine
Smiling too much What it means, that I have a very limited social being, is that I hardly conceive of people as beings but only as spectacle, sight, entertainment Don't meet To love in my way, the fullness of icon worship, is no pleasure to the one loved - to be socially developed is to see in and to show and tell having seen in - I stop at the borders, no stopping at the borders - another veil, the zone between outer and inner which I don't think to cross
- Was she so angry because she thought no one could do what she does? Make a drawing in England out of her territory. - Dreamed Al Morrison and that hopeless love going on shyly all the time, and why was it. He was full of will and resistance and gaiety. So woke in pain about Sharel. She's taking them all on, all the lost loves and still yes - but no - it's my own potency I'm looking for, but also a companion to it. In the dream it was just the sense of him his privacy, leaning toward other places. - If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlayering it with conceptualizations then we see the nature of its intelligence. - Looking for a style Frivolous Self conscious - attempt to secure oneself Dance with the continuing process of energy that has been liberated by this destruction Reinvite the negativity for the sake of energy The 4 karmas - action in situations Pacifying - feeling out the situations softly as a whole Extinguishing - when there are pseudoconcepts you destroy, exclude, ruthlessly If someone attacks or someone praises crazy wisdom will feed on either equally. It is the energy. Negativity simply becomes food. Crazy wisdom needs a situation to play with. Idiot compassion / complete compassion
frivolousness / spontaneity - not the same - frivolous to react reflexively, too much anxiety in it; in spontaneity you are working with the whole situation. Chogyam Trungpa 1976 "Working with negativity" in The myth of freedom and the way of meditation Shambhala - Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news
Projections are exciting and fluid situations Shunyata - stopping the world - absence of concept The positive space of skilful means - thought process and the emotions are transparent and they're taking place in the midst of nowhere, in space. Power or gifted energy If a person's relationship to space is developed properly, perceived properly, then there is no hesitation.
Love - it is originally part of the centreless dance of phenomena, a fire of warmth. And he says a tendency to flow in a particular pattern. It is always ongoing. But put it through an ego and then we "refuse to see the vast space in which all of this energy occurs." Then the energy cannot flow freely in the open space shared with the object of passion. "Try to fix our relationship" - we just touch another person's surface and get stuck there never experiencing their whole being. Free passion is a balanced state of being and highly intelligent. By opening, by dropping our selfconscious grasping, we see not only the surface of the object but the whole way through. We are not overwhelmed by the exterior but seeing the exterior simultaneously puts us through to the interior. True compassion - we do things not for pleasure but because they need to be done, environmental generosity. - Thursday I am so crummy bereft lost dim slow And knowing how crummy I am my face freezes and I cannot speak to anyone because the truth is bankruptcy - She, like wrestling, she wiped me right out from the first moment I didn't have a chance. Letters? Who could trust them. (Me.) She was witty and kept me far away. She paralyzed me. Paralyzed. How does she do it. She's quicker in her brain. Just much quicker and my slow sense hasn't a chance. 'Maintain oneself' is not ego but energy node- - Bang, on the floor. - Cheryl your indirectness drives me crazy. Your magnetic guard. Your shield of lies. Unwilling. Unwilling. And Trudy without silence. Gabble frenzy. Gabble frenzy. Break the spell. Demand. Remember. Don't let her.
To tell the truth there, tell it everywhere. It's contagion of the black-out of fear. The blast of it. Opponent. Kill her, it's harder now, but kill her KILL HER. No more voyeurism and patience. Watch. Oh these dumb exhortations same impotence I can't hurt what I love in that way, got to learn to hurt it - but I go soft. - skandas, stages of ego
the realms are
- [letter to my mom] 8 December Hello M, no word from you since I spoke to you, although you're not teaching. Are you okay? Having a quiet little breakdown to reorganize yourself? Luke goes to England Saturday, I go on the first of January for three weeks. When are you expecting Paul? When does he want to be in Vancouver? I'm flying these days, changing fast, living with a powerful sensation of spiritual adventure, understanding new territories, full of work. Here's a picture of my new persona. She is resisting the photographer's effort to make her smile, but she can be merry - My movie is having an exciting life in the world, my writing also - had a public reading in a coffee house last weekend; that was a pleasure. Write. (Point by point - is that the trouble?) E - Technique is a way of imitating the style of non-duality Thoughts need your attention to survive A simple relationship Mindfulness - relating directly and simply to situations, leaving things in their places - willingness not to cling to the discoveries of mindfulness.
Passionlessness Poverty is not symbolic and therefore don't be confused Narrow path - we give up our homeland and our clingings to superiority, self-preservation. Become a refugee, a lonely person, acknowledge our confusion. When we try to disentangle ourselves the first thing we encounter is entanglement. The bodhisattva vow. From today onwards until enlightenment I am willing to live with my chaos and confusion as well as with that of all other sentient beings. No one-up, working for the benefit of all sentient beings. Acts of generosity. Sharpness, intelligence. The discipline is to relate to earth properly. - What is this place Loss / confusion / anguish / complete separation from other beings He was so unworthy but he got someone to be his. Loneliness, refugee. Xios the refugee. Immigrant. Tonight I have no child at home. In those days of the senses clinging close to physical life, orientation was carried in the skin. These days there is a terror and an impulse to peg down the outside. Unglued: the sense of self very weak and not pleasuring. The blindness settles in so close around. O universe the only thing I need is that transparency when creation lies around me sparkling. Luke going away in a willingness. He hopes he will find somebody to love him and commit themself to him and his child-life: beautiful Luke making a shrine of his bed, the airplanes and the Christmas decorations, oh baybee Luke what an anguish of the human family, I do miss you even though I couldn't bear you for a minute. [Luke moustache] [decorations] [crown] His mother freaking out. Screaming at him the morning of his departure. Tenderness not arriving. Oh the lies. His loneliness he's all alone in his life. Sensation that everything in this place must be measured by the other. Love. To get close to somebody. She called a couple of times to offer coexistence. Stays in touch. - All that to go unrecorded. Amnesty day. C when she was the happy bride. "You're a pain in the ass but you're quite brilliant." (But she didn't let me know either.) Telling is not telling stories - it is when you need to tell. Smiling, smiling and telling stories - I can't listen - it's because I fix the person somehow, I have misgauged them, like Sandra Heinzman at the film and party, her gorgeous Snow White story. I was talking to her as if she was a young student (the accomplished writer she is and no wonder her eyes went skidding sideways and she escaped). - These days, choosing the level. It's a con, you hafta try to always be at your interesting level. Pieties. Inhabitation. Happy people, Bruce [Davis] dancing so playfully and me with my stupie wonder whether he's fancying me when all along he isn't stupid like that, notatall. "To see what you would say." Hard to believe it's true, there they are the realm of the blesst. Have fun let go be what you can couldn't believe what a good party. Bruce reading Finnegan's wake and everybody needing to try and alternate lines, and dialogue and pilgrimace of Childe Horrid, music. Explain everything I do, like my mother! No faith that anyone's here. Working on the social body. We work to have society as good as privacy. But the truth isn't wonderful privacy. It's my privacy mind that needs the sense of Trudy, brain needs talk to think, patterns. CHANGE CODE. Dim dim sleep. Picked up phone to phone Trudy thought no it's C I want to ask phoned 6330 voice not Cheryl. Cheryl? I say in surprise. No says Trudy. Oh wrong one I say baffled embarrassed. Are you asleep? Yes. Maybe because she's there? Last night at the party did the same. Realized and hung up just as it broke its ring. No answer at 5623 because she was there then too. That would salve my pride. She called and said Yes I'm awake. Well the phone rang. Story of the party. Did I lose you just then? Laugh. Sideswiped out. The shock. What was that? Blah blah blah. It's all been said. There it was. I was stopped. We get to know it very quick. She let me know I was out.
Little mouse dodging between under the refrigerator and the closet dark. Stories. Telling stories. You have to be willing to go out into them give yourself up. Dorothy Richardson making a picture. Also they are used in funny ways. Hers and mine.
The woman phoning cos she got the book! A bookstore doing something for me. Phone calls piling in - one ring - it's on the table. One ring. Choy. Cheryl. Richard Pender. Paul.
- Doing field recording of C -
Orchids to say they're real: at last. The light today coming from the sea, which was silvery blue and immanent. Giving Luke what he wants. - Milady C: yes friend consciousness Bruce on the way "We don't know each other in words, but we know each other somewhere. I think we heal each other." She in the movies of long ago so opaque/heavy with fright in her grey face. Entirely transmuted. Businessmen in the street catch sight of her. Happy because there's something I can do for her. We stare, we make circuits. When I stared there was a face that stayed, and it was young. It was whole healed started again. Marvel marvel.
- What can they do that I can't; from the moment she arrives. I hardly exist. Why am I there. Taking my time. Don't offer much. I don't find much. Dreary story. Couldn't keep up. What do you need from me. - T. She's mad at me because she sees my fullness when I love Cheryl. She sees that I'm not moved by her. What you expect punk when you don't show anything of you. It has to go both ways. She's not a trusty teacher but she's played teacher to open me and turn me around and fleece me of my rags. Get thrown out. They demonstrate my inability. Strictly on my own. Can't command attention. My feelings do not arise. My loneliness lies about itself. Stoically accepting itself. That's enough I could shout. They were having a good time, the laughter laughter close close attention. What do you see when you come in and pay no more attention. I look. Cheryl tried to stay with me. The absurdity of a teacher who competes with me. Very dangerous. But who else would do it. Why do you write off. What did you think you saw? The flush of blood, the bright eyes. That is the sign of transformation. I am sallow and have yellow eyes. - Get undermined - they had a skirmish and then it was all right - I didn't skirmish. Should. Exercise is to refuse voyeurism whenever I am tempted by it; bring the confusion. Oh blew it again. Before letting go of self is inhabiting self more accurately A loyalty which is not to pride but to self That die cast on the waters Their word games - I was trying, they were not - then I stopped. -
The essence in the symbols For T - what is your extraordinary anxiety about showing parts of your body hanging onto beauty He says find what is, structurally, relationally, and speak accordingly. T: training the mind. How? Did you learn it, not to use it as Trudy power. Expect to be paid in love, got to pay love for love. - A philosopher who talks about retraining the body, who. Spengler - Decline of the west - morphology of cultures - says all cultural works are interconnected by a psycho-logical necessity. Mathematics he says exemplary language as structure C/f Sufis and geometry He says it is the only language produced which is similar both to the structure of the world and to our nervous system. [Korzybski] Structures express the person and society. When formulated they modulate to something else (Hegel). Phenomenology Dream of finding Cheryl and Roy living together, I was 'happy' for them, they were living in St Albans, with Luke, in a vision of clouds and sky, C wanted to build some sort of flying machine for bird watching, she was expansive, very alit with delight. - [Coming back from visiting my grandparents in Clearbrook I phone Frank in Langley and he invites me to his house for supper. I hadn't seen him for 10 years.] Frank the brat patriarch, Sharon in her shining hair newly washed her sneakers jeans breasts bunched up into a bra in a blue sweater - I was gleeful to find I disliked him, in his fat body and self important carefully trimmed beard and hair. He's so old, 36 but the old generation, an old Hutterite with mean eyes and a pursed mouth. She had a thin mouth too but sprang to milk the goats, speaking to them with such spirit. Tall strong woman, generous, a pleasure, not full of ego like me and him. The little girl and the little boys. She got into the van and drove like crazy up the asphalt hair beautiful, leaning forward talking about how much she'd put into the farm and how nevertheless it is his. "I know what you mean about it being hard to live with somebody" she tells me in the dark. Then she gets out and waits for the bus with me. He knew I didn't like him, he had a stiff smile at the door (I was rude, it gave me pleasure, danced on his grave)(and yet, it was only because he disappointed me and became a patriarch family man), ah he used to be beautiful, the jaw he had, I can't bear that he's pudgy - thought he'd be like his dad, thin and handsome. He said he could walk away into the mountains forever, a few shells and a piece of canvas. It got weird and out of control, she asked about my 'work' in the barn, away from him. He tied down to his armchair, babysitting. How different a visit if we hadn't had the Fruhlied visit. Beautiful goats. Driveway with potholes reflecting headlamps. Single trees. Homestead. Orchard trees, current bushes, nut trees, honey bees, blueberries. - Question of the relation of languages to world, structure of language as map of structure of world - how are we trying to modify our language? What does it imply? They are modes and change experience ie change 'world.' Crazy Korzybski says our language makes rationality impossible and so we copy animals - whereas a right language would allow us to solve all our problems. Alfred Korzybski 1933 Science and sanity: an introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics Institute of General Semantics Writers are language makers it's true, what could a film maker be, what is a language of vision - sequence. Epistemology. Here is the new mythology, darling, sung by coughing ache nightgowned silk-jacketed - darling what, what darling are you? What invention and how much does it take - skin, not even allbody - shoulder, arms, torso, left back, haunch - what will made you my love, why you all epistemology called into love, help me, epistemology, is she real? What can I know, helpless, telling myself I love her but do not love this voice saying nothing to me, arching over me pretending wit - oh, I'd rather a presence here, a somebody, sending direct messages - you, I missed you, I longed for you, or even I didn't miss you but at this moment - they denied me in public - they call me to witness their pleasure in each other - look at it again and again, look at it - let me put my eye out for you, darling, it would give me pleasure to deface you - deface, oh you'd taste it then, one-eyed I wouldn't love you and neither would she - I don't love you - oh? Why should I love you make up a case for you again and again - 1) she has beautiful language, oh she has wonderful language 2) she has that straight furious hard body covered with live skin 3) she - she - someshe - what was next? Has a strange history with me, which I wanted to trust because I wanted to trust myself, because it was so direct. Alas. Haven't found my way a way with you - the for and the - the evidence for and the evidence against what? Believing, illuding, illusing. Only yes I do know what I'm doing I'm going back and replaying it, Trudy has been working to weaken and discredit me, lately without love, primarily she's been fighting to keep C and went too far and got too much but I lied from the beginning (one or the other lie, and this one was the more generous one) when I didn't play her as a deadly rival - now I am doing that, you play outer field baybee and I'll throw one at your head. Mozart from Salzbourg, with rain and thunder in the background. I looked out the window unconsciously to see whether it was raining - - Don't duck, take it square and see stars - good - serves you right - only sometimes can I believe it, want Cheryl? What for? Apply the leverage differently? See what happens if T gets nothing from me and C gets a little whatever I can truthfully find. Doe eyes, she has eyes like an animal's; Trudy is very gallant - oh she can afford to be, loved as she is - the clown and everybody loves her - "I can't hurt her" she says - well, punched her up threw her down, pulled her round by the ear - they were so thick, so close and it's that I can't bear, how close they are and I have to see it again and again - when she put her hands on my shoulders rare extravagance and I had her facing me for a change, shirt vest bandana the sweet cowboy her right eye drifting facing me for a change - oh she pours love into Trudy - I have to have somebody who loves me best of all - isn't that how it is? - every time I start to fly with Trudy she stopped me - she said "How can you be so close to anybody?" and then she tried to make me stupid, probed patronized gave advice addicted infantilized. Nellie - said I want to tell you about it but - told her about it and wept - she said "What will you do so that person doesn't go back inside you again?" ("Oh Cheryl, Ellie isn't looking so good" and it broke me down and I said I couldn't stand that I'd seen how close they were and I couldn't be satisfied any more - "Nellie there aren't enough people in this town who are smart enough for me, don't you understand that?" a great cry. "Yes I do understand that" she says quietly. Her journal full of my name. I'm angry because they showed me my limits as I'd never seen them. I'm angry because they had a stake in my limits. What I saw about Trudy was how she's been controlling. That's what I'm cutting through, that's what it's about, simple opposition however possible. Cheryl had her hands on my shoulders and it poured through them, poured in and poured in I closed my eyes and let it fill up my face, it was a goodness / of some kind. I like your little goodnes. Marsha lives at Cowichan Lake up a logging road. She works at a sawmill sometimes, paints. Her son shot his face off in a boxcar at a sawmill near Cache Creek. Seventeen. He hadn't been with her for a few years. Scared me. The middle son. Have to write/feel Luke's predicaments but not clamp him.
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