| Volume 4 of Dames rocket: 1976 September-December | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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In the fall of 1976 I am making money painting a large house in Kitsilano and continuing to work on the apartment on East Pender. Luke is 5 and has begun at Strathcona School. In part 1 sleeping with two Jewish girls is not yet a shambles. Part 2, a women's festival on Bowen Island. In part 3 I cut off my hair and flounder socially. Shoot what years later becomes Current. Part 4 lostness. First notes for a film in the Peace River Country. Part 5 mostly reading notes. reading and viewing notes: Cohen There are no diamonds in the mine, Claes Oldenburg, Farmer Wind whales of Ishmael, Robert Creeley, John Cage, projective verse, Henri Beston, whales, cockroaches, Agnes Martin, the New Portuguese letters, William Raban Broadwalk, Angle of incidence and Moonshine, Simone Weil, William Gass on Stein's The geographical history of America, Jack Spicer, Jenny Okun, Chogyam Trungpa, Grossinger's Io, Korzybski, Lewis Thompson Lives of a cell, acoustics, shamanism, snakes and goddesses. mentioned: Luke, Billy Little, Nellie van Leeuwen, Trudy R, Cheryl D, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Penny *, Martha *, Don Druick, Renee Rodin, Carol Itter, Maxine Gadd, Skai, * Daphne and Kit Marlatt, Jam Ismail, Josie Cooke and her children Sibhion and Brad, Roy Kiyooka, Judy Ritter, Nellie McClung, Beth Jankola, Cathy Ford, Jean Mallinson, Miranda Mallinson, Ingrid Klassen, Judith Sandiford, Jan Abbey, Ferron, Sandra Heinzman, Bruce Davis, Paul Kinsella, Maggie Shore, Wain Ewing, Women's festival women (Lorine, Barb, Gizelle, Bonny, Jane Perks, Po, Maggie, Marilyn, Betsy), landlord Mr Choy, Frank Doerksen and his wife Sharon. 820A East Pender, the Western Front, VCC cafeteria, Strathcona School, the Lotus bar, Eastern Orthodox church on Campbell Ave, Co-op Radio, Half Moon Cafe, Breadline restaurant, Women's festival on Bowen Island, London Film Co-op show at Pacific Cinemateque. Jane Arden The other side of underneath, Nancy Graves Isy Boukir, John Greyson, Tony Urquhart, Mia Kalavinka, Robin Blaser, Monique Wittig, McAffrey The ship who sang, Isak Dinesen The sailor-boy's tale in Winter's tales, Ponge, Steve Dwoskin Tod und teufel and Trixie. |
I live as if my parents were already dead. The mutation, L muto to change, casting off into another modality, L modus, fashion or measure, than childhood and its work of structuring a self. The sensation of ungluing, slipping into a spirit world casually, edge on like a paper falling behind a table. She looks at the black window glass with its surface like black ice, and she sees - she looks at - an embodied woman raise her hand, pull a string - turn off the light - that makes both the embodiment and what she sees disappear. The vertigo of movement in a corridor. It is a staggering of the head. Yes, it is dangerous: and no, I won't stop yet. - It is culture shock: these people, this people, greets and meets differently. I am goy to them. The birthday party, Trudy wan and almost ugly with fatigue, Cheryl suave, bright and undamaged, brown, always in upright tension, hands sending choked messages. - The constant nag of provinciality - it is too late and too long to be chewing this old fat ego slow middling; it is time for everything to be revised on the way of obvious connections I fail to make. Time for questions to be answered. Nellie says "I'm afraid if I go too far there'll be nobody else there." It is time to work more seriously and with priority. Less fantasy, less décor. - The use of love as a teacher drug. - And who is this, we're ready to abjure, and because of it we are allowed to allow ourselves passion for the first time, and in it the first peacefulness, and what is the debt, for that? I feel shy to write how it was. Late, tired, got into my bed, in my clothes. Madame has always known how to climb the stairs in the dark. Eyes are easy but there's a dizziness in them. I called it, the white fog, the silence - you send in your picadors first, to bleed the bull and weaken it a little, and then you'll be real. It is your method. We stood at the entrance to my room and looked at the open bed in candlelight, and I tell the story of Miriam and Helen. What does she do when she's set free - she finds somebody her own age, says C. I don't think so, I say. The old woman is death, says C. - Oh trouble, I'm bad, Luke and I struggling, Luke so angry with me and not forgiving me, rude, shouting, demanding; and I'm furious, distraught, brutal. I smack him and he wails. He rocks with grief. I'm scared. He's so lucid. You make yourself an invisible car and you smash me! he says. That's why I tell you I wish I could live somewhere else! And I scream the unfairest thing - Well, then, why don't you go and live somewhere else! And he screams, chokes, coughs, sways. I have finished my fury and frustration and come to sit on the end of his bed and say, Now stop, listen, I don't mean that I want you to live somewhere else. But we are having a hard time these days. I'm going crazy. He sits upright blazing anger, eyes wet, defending himself so accurately I was in awe. You make my mind turn off for a thousand years! But your mind isn't turned off, it's working. It is turned off! My heart tells me it is, and Jesus is in my heart and he tells me. Jesus gives us what we need, but he doesn't! "You used to not be so cross," I argue, "you would come into the room and say 'Good morning Ellie!'" "That was a long time ago when I was younger and didn't know so much." He has his voice. But he's very alone. Says C. - Gestures understood and acted on. Phrases misunderstood, the new version accepted as true by the originator of the misunderstood phrase. - Miserable in bed. Long story. Tired. Remember kissing her like scaled down intensity of diamond cutting. Oh mouth in yr snail travel. It was they who made the connection that someone had to make before any of us could sleep. And I fell asleep on their strong breath - they woke me up to see if I was all right. When T and I kiss sometimes Cheryl watches and tells us how beautiful it is. - What is happening to her since I know her? Lately, in just the last weeks she is so beautiful she is blinding, she is pretty which she never was in photographs. She is so light and tight a finger could swivel her, and does but so strong with all my heft I have to struggle to keep her from throwing me. - Trudy my mail order bride, her furry eyes that she looks sideways out of, her mouth is loose, and it's soft - wearing her face, I feel dim, vague, but she is not - she's something so special I cast her in costumes to tell her - gambling woman in red gown, child bride with Berber tattoos. She sat in an orange imitation leather chair in the vast beer parlour of the Austin Hotel on Granville, holding her head like someone so delicate - with that look of veiled sex on her face - ("Everything that's happening is very beautiful"). I watched to see if anyone was seeing her. There was a man who looked from one to the other of us. Waking dismayed and strange and coming out of it into confidences and joys and burnings, breakfast at the big worktable, brilliant blue sky and a façade she feels for. She brought me, through and past the place where I have to stop, stayed with me and breathed me into a breaking through I didn't will - it missed three times and when it broke I rang for ten minutes, my hands from the wrists on all outward needles - now I'm aching thinking of it. Then when I touched her I was already wrung out and could not go with her and it made me feel cold and failed toward her and so we slept and woke and couldn't believe, and then believed. - She puts her arm through mine, awkwardly, it's not the right length, and we go into the little forest to wait for the bus. Sit on the ground, smell it, look through pine trees for the bus. She has beautiful shadows tattooed on her. She's sitting between my knees, and I'm touching her freely as if she were my girlhood friend, and she says she feels young ("You make me feel young") and she is young, and I want to transform her away from that drawling coldness, her disappointment, her James Dean sulk. The car lights go by, we are both tattooed on our faces, her flannel shirt and she in it, feel so good, we're on a little hill, in the underbrush, the streetlights making an intensity like sunlight, the pine giving off a little smell (we've rubbed needles between our hands). The little cedar soil mountain, its vantage of a river of lights, people at a little distance standing beside the bus post letter box. Field beyond, dark, open. We're vigilant and snatch kisses, a maquis. ("I can't be more free so I guess I'll just be more bound.") In our meetings we take a thing and turn it, and turn it, and we give ourselves many of the possible positions. "I wanted to tell you I cried when I got home." - Mrs Choy rapped on the glass, took me by the hand, pointing her little flashlight, down the steps, around the corner to the garden, where she bent down and showed me three little plants, staked up, the Chinese herb I've wanted [rue]. I kissed her and said "Good, thank you, thank you" and she caressed Luke instead of me, and then she took my hand again and led me firmly, with the flashlight, to the foot of my steps. - Remember knee to knee, candle past them so they were profiles like helmets to me, profiles cut sharp as visors - the exactness of each identity, Trudy's long thin sharp, Cheryl's a beaked weight, not pretty women, splendid, black on gold, Trudy saying "I am at war with you, I'm never going to stop fighting you, Cheryl." Infectious smiling battles, there's a joy comes into T along with her irony, her eyes shine when she gets her coldness up. T has a gentleness that she pays for at such a high price that it is credible. C is a brilliant presence. These are our reasons for choosing to believe we love. I am not interested in whether we love. When I feel loved all it means (and I rejoice) is that I am to be allowed to witness and learn, I can stay where I do not have to shrink. ("Now it's your turn to complain that you are not important enough.") I explain many times, that my joy is not perverse, that it is on account of marveling at what I see. Page, page, stroke down over its ribs - lovely page - geranium petal smell like a variant of earth smell, subtle smell of nasturtiums, Raf, Luke, playing war games ("I want to play war") in the sweet light seven o'clock in the corridor. This was a brilliant day, we made the sun shine overnight, how do we do it, struggle in language, like old times, C correcting my perceptions and me listening and believing but fighting and fainting (I faint, I go into a faint) - we kiss and touch a little and then we go to sleep. We got to touch by wrestling, and hard, until it turned to kissing. The wrestling undid my refusal, and I found myself loving to move the watchfulness of wrestling, the force, into making love, which by then it was. We found it, as these folks say. I dove my hand into the place between her shoulder blades and I was so wrapped in joy of white love I could tell her "You have these hard wings so far apart and between them there's a meadow, a field with flowers and grass, warm." I touched as much as I could reach and she said and I said, but it was me that rang, and she went girlish, softer even more in her voice, making jokes. Something so hard with something so soft on top. My beauty, I called her. Your beauty, she said. There are no diamonds in the mine, I sang, in the kitchen, before there were again. Wrestling on the steps of the Chinese café. The art school at lunch looking up entranced when we came in together. Her, me, or us? My shoulders felt so far back, walking with her. An incongruous grace of the cripple. Alight. Her eyes have white all the way around them.
- Deficiencies of consciousness. Poetry - not being right there. Again and again, I'm ashamed of the sleep. Okay, well. What they do, that is different, is: when in doubt they're hard rather than polite. They make unease work, to give it a content. Make a contrast so we're relieved when we can tender ourselves. They make me feel I'm the emotional raw material they practice their poise on - sometimes it prevails and they see my 'soul' shine. Their mannerism is attack.
- They were walking on 3rd toward home, Cheryl, betrayed she thought, threw Trudy to the ground, and I had things to do and kept walking as if I didn't see, but they were regarded by a woman in the nearest house who came and said "Stop that, you can't do that", appalled two women going for each other's throats, "I'll never let you go! I'll never let you go!" screams Cheryl. The delight of the right war, how witty it is, faces breaking out in teeth, startled laughter, punches, only women could be so elegant in their violence? So comfortable. Their war animates me, after a while, animates a tenderness in me, makes me supple and smart, even quick, in the silence of right gesture. "You and she are from the same tribe," on the stairs, after she's given me a look like a broken heart - oh sweetie! "Oh but you and I are out of the same womb." Then she startles, hears Cheryl sniffing, is she crying, no, it's coke. I add my head to Trudy's and Cheryl looks at her only, I am the witness and I am the trusted, the retainer, the loving servant with a free and flying heart.
- Both grow large and small, nearly always together. - Oh, you impress me, and the more you do the more I must impress myself too. And we have witnesses. - They sit opposite at a table and (watched it's true) they put into operation their social machine, flashing mirrors, flashing knives, word counterword pun antonym they play and then it falls away all of it falls past them and keeps falling they're at a card table in outer space, an array of instruments, flowers too, card table is solid they semitransparent with stars. -
Anna [at the Greek Islands restaurant] says to Trudy and me: "Are you relatives?" The bridge, sun pushing heat on us like a wind, trains warning nobody off the tracks, the light, the light all day. - "It was true, it really happened" I said. "It was given to you. By your father?" she said. I told her the story of the hotel. "And then he called me to come out to where they were, and he said 'Would you still want her?'" I saw how her face as I began the phrase felt the blow. "You're going to have to find it in me too." "I know." The streets in their glaze of heat and light rare autumn's soft powdery air, cool and hot; tonight the great pleasure of coming out of the school to see the city spread orange, a viewpoint found, a monument and institution for seeing the evening light - even the cars had a glory on them, Luke in red socks and sweater running through the dark blue air with a red white and blue ball. A charmed time. All day today a day like before dying, it was let in. - The belly pain after the Thanksgiving party - "It's there in beginnings" - defeat because I could make no true gestures, except to wrestle with the kids and make them scream - pierced by beauty, cut into, enmarveled, by the beauty of the dark heavy people - Rhoda, Cheryl, Trudy, Don - Rhoda in her rumpled face, jiggly dance, layers of clothes - most - Cheryl and Trudy looked like scattered young girls next to her - wear, tear and freedom. "You wanted Rhoda!" said Trudy on the telephone, and I couldn't say and she didn't believe it but I did want Rhoda and who knew? Sorceress herself? Jam says quarks have 4 names: up down strange and charm. - "Her hunger for being, for being seen in every place; the way it makes people feel they are not. I didn't see it before." Blasted if she doesn't come, an energy reverses and burns her out. She runs on sex, but what is sex? She sat on the park bench and cried and cried and then she said to Trudy "I'm just going to love you until I don't. Do you like it if I love you?" - These are notes for someday - Cockroaches - gallant horses, swift walk, bannered, when alone. Hearing my shadow move on their crack they raise their feelers and they wait tentative. When I discover them under the cutlery, a nest, old and their young, in a panic, refugees flooding into a hole, I pity them, and wipe them out. Their hiding places, the scale they force me to acknowledge, they make a complex of my cubby holes, they stroll on the picture rail. They are not at ease as they were, nesting under sheets of wallpaper. They live as close to the food, now, as they can, they raid even in daylight, it is water they are after, a drop on a spoon. When I miss they drop, let go, throw themselves to the floor. Who are they, what alien people. A nomadic, dry people. When they fall on their back they can't turn. Nervousness, sudden movements everywhere. High stepping gallant horses, moving slowly. When they sense their danger, speed like fish. - The woman on the bus, who holds her head back, and an umbrella and a purse above her face. "She got a fright one day" says T, "and now she can't look any more." -
- "Ellie I'm really into summarines now. I'm really interested in how they look." - 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. - 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. 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. 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. 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. ("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. - "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." "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. "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." "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."
"I haven't seen the person who made the film. That sense of structure in time."
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. - 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. - "Trudy works hard for me! You don't work for me at all! I don't work for you either." "Trudy is in my life in a way you can't be." - 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. - 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 feed, 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. 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. 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. 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. It is a brutality of lying, evading and using, of patronage; but it is not a brutality because everything nonetheless is very clear. 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. I'm very accurate in those encounters, silent when it's true. 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.
"Everyone comes with their stories, and they tell their stories, and then they realize that everything is happening right there." The kitchen table form. Alert. Everyone visible, cup after cup of coffee and brandy. The form is that of sensing the assembled hunger. All of them wanting to be seen and loved, says T. - 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. Your gaiety. There's room for me, when you will. Liddle kisses and imaginary feels. - I saw that they seem so far away because I do not bring myself near. Sense of danger. Does everyone go to the same place when you understand or are understood, how do you know. Is it a school? - "You weren't there at all, everything you said was dead. There was no way to take it up." Self-criticisms of social being - platitude, passivity, lending out too much, obedient smiling or laughing, dissociation drift. The being is all wrong. I see it. The secret being of certain moments is the fictional self. Radioactive cloud passing over, a complete dissociation from 'outside'. The sensation of having died and gone to heaven. A lucidity but a disembodiment.
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 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. -
She was witty and kept me far away. She paralyzed me. Paralyzed. -
To tell the truth there, tell it everywhere. It's contagion of the black-out of fear. The blast of it. - What can they do that I can't; from the moment she arrives. I hardly exist. 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. 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. Exercise is to refuse voyeurism whenever I am tempted by it; bring the confusion. 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 - 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 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. Beautiful goats. Driveway with potholes reflecting headlamps. Single trees. Homestead. Orchard trees, current bushes, nut trees, honey bees, blueberries. - Mozart from Salzbourg, with rain and thunder in the background. I looked out the window unconsciously to see whether it was raining - "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 - I told her about it and wept - she said "What will you do so that person doesn't go back inside you again?" - "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. 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. 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.
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