| dames rocket 5 part 4 - march 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[My mom visits and meets C and T around my kitchen table.] It's her heaviness I can't stand, the 'loving' and 'caring,' the stories of pathetic people we don't know - what T saw she wasn't able to direct because it was for me and I couldn't find the way to steer her out of that place she wanted to be in. Talking 'intimately' of 'real' things. To her intimacy is a subject matter and not a way, a focus. I don't have any tales of how anyone looked - does that mean I wasn't there. I was trying to push her into a free-er mind. Worst is that they'll talk about it without me and I want to be there for that, T will rapidly say what she saw, C will have a more tentative version. T all the more because she was silent. C had a softness in her and is making something of it and T is watching. C lent herself! Both of us so bored, and C lending herself. No transformations except when we could bring their mothers. - Oh it's her heaviness, she doesn't know how to be silent and find herself, she tries to please. I tried to make her interesting. The hate = competitive T. She was there as bored as me, feeling what a con my mama's revelations are - there was something, that she and Cheryl greeted each other differently (What's this?) Mary was tired and doing an act for my friends, much praised for her honesty, now she's stuck in it Mary Epp the child prodigy - does she invent the childhood different than it was? (My brain kicked in when I said that, a sensation like a little muscle pinch running around the left side of the crown.) Trying to find the things that stop her: There was that impersonation of a good person. (John - did he see? Yah he did.) ("I'm in love with my models when I draw them.") I can't touch that impersonator. She was scared of Trudy. It's how opaque she is. She doesn't reflect, she didn't bring anything out of me. She's more self-absorbed than ever. It exhausts me. She was always tuned to Luke's needs. When we were talking about god, she was riveted. Information - how as a three year old coming back, I refused to be their child, and everytime I came back I had a distance on them and wouldn't be their child. (Luke holding hands on the street.) Also how at first I complained, "I called and called, why didn't you come." "Was ist" she said was my first speech. What was I wanting to know ... what could a two year old know about THINGS? She doesn't talk about what she sees. What is her intelligence. (The woman Mrs Martin who has invented what she calls a brain surgery for children with learning difficulties, she does it with words.) "She's aged beautifully" says T. "I see her clumsiness" say I. "She's so awkward." She leaned forward speaking too earnestly. She's so heavy, I said it to T, to let out T's hostility to her. Trudy didn't like her! Wowie, how nice for me. She saw the impostor. "I gave it to your mother" meaning her energy. "She's competitive" - she tried to tell them all her legend. The Hallowe'en story, making herself interesting. It was hard for her because of their size. "Your mother is fantastic" they've said. She needed it from them, for reasons of standing, she found out how to have it, although the legend is that it was her mind. But now that she has her degree (piously I applaud) she isn't actually interested in her mind and is falling back into Christianity. Cheryl's mother playing bridge, teaching mathematics, the career mother. Did Cheryl like her unbourgeousness? Did Cheryl try to be like her? "We broke through something" said T and it had been sudden: "I have to go." But then it was alright. We had broken through something. She isn't a writer either. She doesn't do it. What does she do? "How it is with T and I. We think to ourselves - have I got it to make this phone call? No. But I want to have a little touchdown." - "She freezes the air around her" said C, of her mother! It killed me when I was talking to Cheryl, out the window with her, she so kindly and full of her own happiness, when she said "Here's Trudy" in a small voice, and I was kicked right out of heaven into nowhere. Went to bed to knock myself out and thrashed in a fullness of emptiness: I want a lover! I want to be able to open something, I'm so sealed, my sex is so sealed, a rage of disappointment, Trudy and I don't make it anywhere, and with Cheryl I get these shreds I have to disown before they make me shriek. The lone ranger, alright, alright, I'll [ballpoint runs out]
Inventing a speech in a group, the compact made, the way they knew each other What it is, is that I feel I have to go there first - my sexuality and love are all behind it and it is between us, the complete feeling out of our otherness.
Oh cello, that's better If I go into Hegel, that's where it gathers itself up Michael Fox said I wrote about him better than anyone he knew sometimes Everything else is too small I intend to be a philosopher But the difficulty of feeling, investing the senses, is I have such a gift for it And the narrative - has this beautiful fluency In telling tales of my life, any way to get bigger Because I do hunger for a big vision, and work toward it And here goddamn 3 people who are also ahead of me, more fluent in it. Makes the ground shake like jelly l'être et le néant Write the Duras piece as philosophy, assembled parts, a new essay form. Oh love watch the mind. Your learning. I'll never know you because you did that together before I knew you, and it changed you. I won't go because I know C and T will be so close so close I can't get in - unless something stops them, I don't have a chance.
When you're in the deep end I help you - So: they gathered once another time, I got to talk to Cheryl who didn't freeze the air, about my thoughts - what if a plant had a very strong will and tried to take us over - she wanted to know about the consciousness of a galaxy. I said Hegel was about the relation of consciousness to the world. I want to go back in time and find the thoughts that were so secretive, and bring them here. The thing is: Rhoda, Cheryl, Trudy, myself, at the table, it is a time: if I have the strength I can bring myself there, if I had the strength I could have stopped Trudy's mad raves, but I wanted them kind and Cheryl was - her voice going on, explaining me and defending me, so level - she said "You have to do what makes it right for you" - that was on account of how I wanted by then to lie next to her - but Trudy expanded her brutality to obliterate me by not allowing me to feel for Cheryl, which is where I felt. "Will you hold me round" she said and Cheryl moved so swift glad to do it. The fragmented journal - that's the question I've been asking - (the wall has to be up to date otherwise I lose it) the fragmented journal is not better, a fluent line that moves right, is always best and will come again. What I see, having gone home, is my pleasure in them. Gratitude. Rhoda's salon. Talking to Rhoda about traveling alone, alert to find what you need, baths in hotels. Anna war Artzt und lebte nicht im hohen Norden. Question is whether to elaborate it or drop it. - They are my work, mysteriously, as in the old days with Roy, I have to work at love, again, so difficult this time, impossible to dream of mating and so it has to be something else, simply love, losing and not losing. Alright I will. She says she thought of the little baby calling and calling, a pain I never found again, and yet, they say, I have it still in me? Oh Emily Dickinson so lonely so far ahead. And working at love, this time too, means working with my brain - do not elaborate - or - elaborate? - Watch nostrils. Luke's songs
("There!") Luke's songs again
[and more] In Luke's printing: to day I went with you The end [drawing of a boy laughing] The end - Hildegard
- nadis And the house, invisible away behind her, meeting her imagination as it recoiled from the revelation of the flowers had lost its solidity, become a frail and porous structure crumbling upon the plot of earth it mapped into rooms to shelter a few briefly living people. Picture of a train stopped in a field - reflects flowers in its windows - the train moves off and what is in the windows - what does it do? It stays still but interrupted. [Richardson] - Woke at night with the sense of things understood in some new delicate way, I can't at all uncover it now, but a tuning that was new and lovely, and it was Trudy a fullness of somewhere I'd been with her, oh Trudy I thought come all open. - Let me think about it more not less. Instructions to these days:
A falsity is a tension - a tense forward out of the ease and safety of the actual natural
Drug drug I pay in this medicine for what I know I know everything I need to know and look around me in a new world where everything speaks its meanings so securely and happily but I am only ghostly there, a voyeur maybe, loving knowledge but passed out of body. Oh it did take me away from the suffocation of that misery, it opened the gate both doors If that misery is let alone does it jump me to a lucid place The stone protects itself. If I leave myself messages why do I always forget them or forget to look at them. I could look fine-grained / rosy / bright eyed in a tight shiny skinned body That's how I'll know when the mind is right
because EVERY human is completely plastic and therefore precisely precisely expressive The way we read these things when we aren't afraid is through the posture sense we have We read the word as our body writes constant oscillations
imagine a dark blue sky with one constellation - lines drawn in - blueprint - moving constantly write a poem starts imagine a list some interesting concepts shaking out loose like rope, yarn our being is a writing, style changes, hand changes skating a skater who on the foreshort rectangle trapezium of the rink writes out in linked words the meaning of herself ... Janeen
I am so extremely beautiful I should - if I have to be in the world partly, make much out of my beauty in order to wear it as a reminder. Makeup is a metaphor for consciousness. When it isn't a disguise for those who don't like themselves. High cheekbones and big noses, cut eyelids and pointed chins imply alertness. Sophia Loren looks very conscious. Hey Trudy: is it true - we speak as though - hey Trudy, it is true you and I we love each other, we have it for each other, it isn't possible, it's possible, I have to have you once in a while - every Wednesday afternoon say and really - your wife won't let you will she. Could I find it truer - at true none of this seems a felt feeling Take pictures of it Wear hair like young Lucy
- Hilda Janzen Hysteria with Trudy - I have a ravenous lover in me who's longing to get out, cheated, frustrated, screaming for it - and to let go into it just for a little while would it clear me? The girl's journals - false and true voices, when she's herself she's very good - she sounds like Richardson, but who's this - The long history of repression in those days cutting everything off never being able to go into it, denying, keeping to myself, loving separately. All the trouble and falsity about sex And yet a real voice only came when [1962] I let myself into Frank by letting him go, kicking him out The awful dangers of sex for that girl, the awful dangers of love, it would have cut me off and put me into a false position And after that it never happened again, I never had it like that again, it has never been like that again Confidence with somebody: this is good Well, Paul, but the same sense of a drastic danger I had to save myself from "''Kay you have to wake up because I'm going to do the boogie dance!" Luke with Brad and Mathew, bare naked. "Boogie, boogie." Sense of my special value and waiting for somebody who would be an equal exchange. - Lady: Thee: Tell who she is. Who is anyone. She came with a woman I saw. She was the twin. When she first spoke to me she refused everything I said. This is the legend. Why is it so heavy? I am confused because my feelings haven't been free in a long time. I don't trust myself. I don't know if these women are real. Tell what grieves you most. That I can't show my work to Trudy, who saw it: who had the gift to come into me. Not only to you: No, Trudy knows how. Cheryl is hooked, Rhoda too, no one else can see into them. Cheryl is strained eats coke, she cuts herself so sharp but Rhoda's beautiful. You're asking yourself the cost of what she sees: She brings something alive and it costs your guards and comforts. Do you like yourself with her. We've flown. She reaches in. We can speak to each other when we're let. Do you want her. It isn't her beauty or her glamour, that mean so much to Cheryl, it's when we've got close and I fill up with her. The being's sudden movements. "You are in me." When I want her is very real. Do you still 'want' Cheryl. When I held her and heard how she breathed I liked to hold her but I hate her refusals and meanness. I hate how she made a poverty in me withholding everything she could, I love her language but when she moves she seems to be clockwork so stiff, making terror around her. A wired fascist. Her frightened daughter the scholar. She's very far out of the world. I'm lost, she said, the little seductive voice said. Dancing in the only way she can refusing pleasures unless she is perfectly safe in them and no one is instructing her. Oh scaredy splendour. Yes, I feel for you. Your self referring contracted world. It's your context too, who knows you. What does Trudy - who's Trudy in this? She's restless, all the weight of Cheryl's depending, she sees how I'm beautiful. She likes that I'm her twin. She likes to feel me, she's sexually unanchored because Cheryl doesn't touch her right - but how not. I saw them, talking when they were in sex together. She doesn't let her come to her own time, and Cheryl doesn't because she loves her I want more than she loves to be in Trudy wisely - the I want that is sent away out of me, it's where I hardly ever go these days - the energy of 16-18 was a strong I want and maybe the lists and plans and ambitions were a way of keeping that vivid world in place. I-want band.
I want attaches us to our lives makes us alert, literary comes from this excited intentionality. Do the sorts of descriptions betray it. Hysteria is an impossible I want closed in. Wanting very bad. That makes life brilliant. Frank and I using each other. But when I got rid of him and we both came into a beautiful freedom and ecstasy by it, spending it all on a big hot fire before it could go away. We made our attachment to 'life' - then it pushed me into a realness real passion it amounted to focusing on my real position in the world for the first time. I choose to be alone. I want but more than to love, to have loving feeling (the sort of verb it is), I want to be alone and free. I went through the door that gave my mind a birth into myself, which before had belonged to my parents, my mother, journalism, the tribe's language. I succeeded in holding out for myself, against the first real friendship I'd had in the world. Co-option. This story of Frank did I find it today because of Trudy, you're somebody I could share myself with (yet the false language of our letters, so perverted by our lies about sex) and I can't touch you either and it's a way of giving ourselves an I want hype. I lied about Father. About sex and gender. Also about wanting goodness. It's too bad. The religion is so false it took my mind for years, Olivia so much less false by comparison, quaintly direct. I was a prig. - What could you imagine? Every handwriting also indicates somebody's time-sense precisely. What he didn't see was that Emily Dickinson's poems were like the uneven edges of a little key - functional and unique. When her book was published and the key turned, it unlocked the poetry of a new century. Judith Thurman - the picture of the key so concrete the poems will always look like that. Judith Thurman 1975 I became alone Atheneum (on Sappho, Dickinson, Louise Labé, Ann Bradstreet, Juana Ines de la Cruz) At the poetry reading do a reading - a drama - of other people's work. That's what I have the look for Such a presence I could have - The video is a piece I could let out Do an exercise with the journals and my view of them - If I could love Trudy I would build her moment by moment, in myself, into a complete person, and the attention I gave her would tune me to attention, and this is the value of a passion; it was because I suddenly held her image quite lucent in me as I haven't seen it since earliest days. And then only for little times. Trudy. Behind the picture of you hanging in air is me. Twins used to write each other penpal letters in the prairies. Mary Gordon Chase of the wild goose With the look on your face that you have - glee - she's got more vitality in her than Cheryl who tries to pump herself up who does inflate her self with unspent hoardings, Trudy is a river, hers is in movement. An arrowhead and a river I was right in those days. Water and stone. I am water, too, so I'm learning, and that girl had a knife in her but it was only the knife of breaking out. Cheryl doesn't know she's out / the danger is past. It's been funny with T since I came back from London, between us has been the comfort of very confident love - of course we love each other, there's no question between us - and I pursued Cheryl - and when a repressed thing suddenly becomes conscious - we love each other? Like that? What a place to go. Trudy could get her virility back, she could be a blossoming strong direct bigger presence and we could backpack! They so hothouse weedy - I imagined making her do exuberant things - I did, I made her - I still have/am a physical explosiveness, it's my body type, I've found it again! I don't at all want to be C's coiled spring, it's Elias I'm like, what a laugh. "A female of vigorous, aggressive, exuberant vitality," for the first time in my life I know what I have. Maranon held that sexuality is a unity quality and that in man it attained full development whereas in woman it remained at a kind of halfway stage; only the lesbian could have as rich a libido as that of the male and she would therefore represent a superior feminine type. [later in pencil: This is stupid.] Simone de Beauvoir 1949/1953 The second sex Jonathan Cape If I kept Trudy visible in me my sexuality would be entirely open to her, for coming or going - the curious thing in Cheryl that my sexuality was entirely aggressive with her, what she gives does nothing - because she doesn't see me, maybe. "You're so feminine" says T to me. "You're so feminine" says C to T. Trying to find herself in her otherness. I was neither the one nor really the other. I'm having peripheral visions of what Trudy and I could have done together - "You let me see her in such a way"
Movie called Inversion version version
It is only when her fingers trace the body of a woman whose fingers in turn trace her body that the miracle of the mirror is accomplished. Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to recreate the self through her in exact reciprocity ... each is at once subject and object. She can go her way in calm indifference only when she is old enough or backed by considerable social prestige. Velvet and silk ... her friend's body itself may take their place. They are not sanctioned by an institution or by the mores, nor are they regulated by conventions; hence, they are marked by an especial sincerity. Because the partners are homologous, basically alike, all kinds of combinations transpositions exchanges comedies are possible. The women students at Sèvres who lived together far from men Instead of giving herself generously to a work she undertakes considers it simply as an adornment of her life ... an essential means for exhibiting in public that essential reality, her own self. Reminding us that she is a woman by a few wellchosen graces They exercise their genius for oddity in their mode of life Your body would change, what a dream you'd never let go of what you got with C - could I bear it? If I had enough room and if we stayed focused yes. Come and live with me she said. Oh Ellie. Good faith. Not acting a part. Acting from what it is to be a being. I'll never let you go yelled Cheryl and she won't. Trudy imagines a time. We have not seen the last of it. But you and I are from the same womb. I can act toward her, I have a freedom with her. It's what she gives me. To get to Cheryl you have to dig your way in through a collapsed mineshaft and pick her out. Bone by bone. The darkness in there. You send up sheets of spangles you want to play.
Do the false magic and then reveal it, set a trap and spring it. The calm sincerity, the irony, the ease of Stendhal she says; but what was irony. The disinterested attitude toward the universe that opens the widest horizons Woman exhausts her courage dissipating mirages and she stops in terror at the threshold of reality. They are interested in things rather than in relations of things their words speak directly to the senses. It is when she speaks of moors and gardens They are interested in things as a form of relation - it's there - our relation to the world the same as our relation to a person. Attempts to found the world anew on a human liberty You exist and thereby I'm set free to exist alone again. I do not need to prove to me every day that you exist. I do not need to do that for me. I just need to be able to pick a posture. Immanence and outerness. The I am of the world or the I am of what sees. We would be very different: we would change.
- She: Lady: Thee: Why did you call me? Are you mine to call? What I give you, you give me in another life. Help me to see clearly; I am offered a love war. Do you want a love war? I have had times with this woman when my best mind was me. It spoke and she replied as you may. Is this a legend? I was in eternity: I was satisfied. Will she let herself into it with you? Will the mind we make be hers or mine? Ask her - whether when it happens she feels that it is hers or yours. Is it yours? It's mine, I recognize everything in it but differently made: like the drawings which were my preoccupation drawn in her way. You don't feel lost in it? Found. Is there a danger in that? (Every moment ask only questions that are the really interesting questions.) Again: are you lying? Found - do you mean - to feel lucid in that way may be a free ride? I have often, alone, been lit with that right mind. It isn't your right mind. It's the right mind, which isn't hers either. (Does she understand that what she does) And no it's only a mind on the way to right. Does she understand that the way she gets into people - I got it, she gets into people and speaks to them so that their deep voice hears itself speak, and then they feel that they have lost themselves. When they lose you - but baby what I have to tell you is that. You're going to teach me to talk to myself, you're going to set me free. And I know what I want you for. And to let me break open my body. The tree antenna above me Find the part in a poem for which the rest of the poem is written - and write that. - Are you going to be able to bear when she turns back to Cheryl? Cheryl has to learn what I have to learn, she doesn't get special protection. But can you keep it alive right in the stone in the courtyard, the fire source, will you know how to keep it right there? It'll be my task. Is it what you want to do? If you wrestle this angel will you live? So it means your double, with whom you speak - you fight as best you can because your life depends on it, it is the only fight worth you. Is there a way to live in the world that way?
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We both wanted not to lose ourselves, we held ourselves in ourselves hoping for momentary release, we tried to speak the truth, we didn't look at one another, we were either there or only a little sad there were no openings or annunciations. It was nice to kiss you. She dated it as a beginning and was willing not to follow the program. What are you afraid of? That the passion Cheryl makes with her, that thunderstorm,
Oo a good one:
- will make her sell me out. This comes from another time. It's true, it comes from so far back I could forget it, it comes from a time when my lies bound me stuffed my mouth made my body so awkward - the time of lies - when I have my true nearer I am not uninteresting. Tell a little truth then: We are strangers she and I. Talking eyes closed searching in ourselves for what the other will see as true. Looking for a firm place. It was good kissing you, it was nice telling you Christie standing in her room with her arm over her breasts. "You love to talk" she said. "I'm just learning." "Seeing you born," she said, "it takes me back to the time it was happening for me. Roy and Rhoda, Rhoda and I found it together." She says she wants not to get lost in anyone any more. Is she lying? No but she'll do it anyway. Her nature! What hurt me, I'll say it, was when she said "She's such a snob, if you had something she wanted to learn she'd have gone after you. I don't mean that you don't know anything she could learn, but she doesn't see it." The Novocain girl sweating out a fix that sucks in everything around it, devours beings black hole orphan. I explained snobbery: "It's when you aren't yet who you are." Cheryl would have to be pursued into her blackness and found there, and only Trudy can do it, and Trudy likes to do it because only Trudy can do it and there is the privilege of an owned soul. But Trudy is having a triumph? No, because she didn't win me away, I gave Cheryl what I had as much as I had without connection, I had to give it and when I could. I don't have it any more. And then I'm free except for hurt feelings and then I look around and see Trudy interested in making me more real in her and yes I'll take you up in that. Ego boundaries! Ah ha yes it's deciding what part of what you're being is your own. I've done that with C, I entered her confusions and met her there now I enter T's landscapes. "They scare me. They make my head buzz," she says, when she's drawing them. Writing in the journal as if to strangers, explaining things. That's instinctive and true.
Your perfume is wrong. "The abundant life is there." "If you see god's glory." To imagine the world as an artifact, is to see it as a relation of parts, things assembled in certain relations. This is the same mind that we look for: but to shift it - oh am I responsible for inventing the world where such pain and loss takes place, oh Trudy you know there is that: when I find the right mind I'll have to help the world, when I understand everything.
Help me: humility means, to speak and act as if someone were watching, who understood everything. The omnipotent - to see into what is, to create the world in abundance, abundance, to carry that abundance brightening the world for a radius of half a mile. Trudy's voices, the charming one, the baby, the direct. Mine, the refined one, the deep comfortable one, the frightened thin one, the conscious supple one with irony in it.
Lies are the worst crime, it's as I used to know. Lies brutalize most, every lie brutalizes a situation and everyone in it. Lies make us ugly and make us sick. Look carefully to see who's lying and what it is. Look carefully. Oh thank the universe for this first deliverance. Devotion is gratitude and interest, a passionate interest in as much of the whole as possible. Lady: Thee: It is beautiful to be allowed to see. I am frightened of forgetting forever, losing it and having to go back to the dumb restless hunger for it. Ask now about how to remind myself.
When I talk to Trudy there is a different sense of space than when I talk to anyone - it is a sense of an equal horizontal reach; oftentimes I feel that of what I have in me only a small amount is indirectly transmitted. With Trudy my forehead stands open. "I guess I'm having a love affair with Cheryl." "My mother's love affair was as important to me as my father, in those days. I hated her for it." Lady! Come quick, there's a hurt in me, I want her here, I want her to let herself out into me, I'm scared she'll take it all back to Cheryl. The sensation of having a 'friend' is myself become the world, less concentrated - is that why C conserves herself so brutally. I have to be a bush pilot, in another life -
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