| dames rocket 6 part 1 - april 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Vancouver, April 1977] [notes on perspective drawing not transcribed] Palm-leaf fibre map sea-going natives of the Marshall Islands made according to secret methods. Curved lengths represent the prevailing direction of the wavefronts in relation to the islands, marked by tiny shells. Making maps - take textures and print them as topography - cartographers - credulous - the quality of a mark - a cartographer whose lines elaborate a place - daily work - a blank map - little piece in which territories are compared Geodesy is that branch of applied math which determines by observation and measurement the size and shape of the earth, the coordinates of points, the lengths and directions of lines on the earth's surface, and the variations of terrestrial gravity. Geometrical question size and shape of the earth, intercontinental ties among land masses, determination of positions, lengths of lines, and azimuths. Physical question gravity field of the earth, or direction an magnitude of the physical force which links the earth to objects on its surface and in surrounding space. A study of gravity is useful in determining the shape, but not the size, of earth. Although these two parts of geodesy may be studied separately, in practice they are closely interwoven. To practice drawing high complex mountains it is best to make them into islands. Not the sharp crests and strong shading. Eskimo map of carved wood pasted on sealskin stretched on a frame. Implies flying. The complex relation of map and upper air. Map has on it smoke throwing a shadow. The map has on it a moving shadow of airplane. Table with maps in different perspective. Relation of two kinds of information. Two different maps next to each other. Translation simultaneous or not In childhood mapping made The windrose prairies The people in libraries funneled into pages sometimes saying hhhmmmh. Literature finding charms Put things on maps that then create the world - the child's obsession The way water reforms the map - making what's manifest (relevant) a different shape The charts that map the bottom's contours Curved space is not curved space
- Einstein it is said learned to speak very late, not fluent at 9, says he discovered relativity because children think of space and time, normally, but he didn't until he had an adult's ability to see it that way. Mozart and mathematics. "I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details." Spinoza's god who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists. He wanted to construct an apparatus which would accurately measure the earth's movement against the aether. La Place. An intelligence knowing at a given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, providing her intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to her nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in her eyes. Frame some credible theory of the luminiferous ether. capillarity and potential differences. The attraction of this subject for Einstein, dealing as it did with the links between intermolecular and other forces. It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth. A study group Brownian motion - viscosity Seeing the exact point of boggle and stop Scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct Theories into which facts were later seen to fit were more likely to stand the test of time than theories constructed entirely from experimental evidence. Quanta - how-much's - burst of energy - quanta related in size to frequency of their wave - Planck's constant Physics a sort of complex mythology I'm pursuing for its accidental structures and its difficulty, which intoxicates me. I don't believe any of it.
Acted on by Moiré screen What happens when grids interact Grids of different scale all moving It would be all nothing or all something Why isn't it possible to visualize it, because they are not lines. If they were lines it would be a fullness but they are only messages being transmitted whispers through the aether - going into/under ether - the structure of trying to stay awake to see the operating room - things being done happening in darkness - later - tell him to be careful of the scar - he is cutting into the bone, this handsome man who's attracted to me, Charles, he is reaching inside the closed parts of the skin and changing me - and I'm letting him. Girdles. Curlers. They are only messages being transmitted in all directions Putting his hands into parts of the body that have no door and cutting bone, nailing it together again. Do the dark places in the brain correspond to dark places in the body. Is the brain in any part of it not connected to the nerves that carry messages. Yoga wakes. Other ways wake.
- The phenomenology of the pursuit of physics When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. T was tackling me as she did C. That accounts for her errors. To really think and imagine rather than stopping the mind or going into anxious tchitch. Each person carries their own space and time. Except for memory, which thinks it can tell I'd like to do tests on us to see more exactly how our worlds are different. But we bend each other's minds. Relativity only significant at speeds nearby the speed of light which becomes the axis deep-going revision of that conception of space which has been impressed upon human thinking in its previous period of development All mass is energy held in; all energy is liberated matter. Newton Opticks Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition? The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations. Paths which could be predicted once the vectors imposed on them were known. who developed rich correspondence with any scientist who had similar interests 4th 'dimension' = a 4th variable Someone who could split her atoms and destroy the world. Can the will do it? Not that scale. I entered Einstein's room. He was calmly philosophic, with one hand rocking the bassinet in which there was a child. In his mouth Einstein had a bad, a very bad, cigar, and in the other hand was an open book. The stove was smoking horribly. - The beauty of a circumstance, that at certain times in science and in music, there have been precise things to work on. Is there such a thing in movies now? Every time: only to find centrality. - Want to make a map of a poppy 'Definition' by interest - Mr Mann teaching science That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr's unique instinct and tact to discover the major laws of the spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atoms together with their significance for chemistry, appeared to me like a miracle - and appears to me as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought. Equivalence of acceleration of the reference frame and of the gravitational field If the speed of light is in the least bit affected by the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and theory of gravity is false. After he came up with the General Theory he said "For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is." Bird's shadows are there every once in a while sometimes with a sound sometimes not.
Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life. Gravity not a force but a characteristic of space itself. Space is not merely a background for events but possesses an autonomous structure. Gravity was a function of matter itself, its effects transmitted through continguous portions of spacetime. In fact he seems always to have worked around the idea of light, trying to see it. The perihelion - place in orbit nearest the sun - of Mercury The calculus of perturbations The behavior of light in a gravitational field Vibrations of the atoms those impeccable timepieces of the universe. An atom vibrating in a strong gravitational field will vibrate more slowly, lower frequency = color shift toward red. For a long time I have suspected that the indirections of art are intuitions of 'physical' and experiential structures. the joy of our homing drive to know. Indirect or direct. Opened an entirely new world of time-dependent universes: expanding, collapsing and pulsating ones. Finite but unbounded space Law of inertia not a property of empty space but an effect of the total system of stars. 1919 confirmation eclipse of the General Theory Lessing born - where was Dorothy? Light primary to religion not historically but in every individual.
The candour of letters to colleagues. "Not often in life has a man given me such happiness by his mere presence as you have done." Haldane and his sister Elizabeth, who translated Descartes And Hegel - live together - he writes his mother every day Taken up the chair of experimental philosophy A shadow, in that it is part of the changed area that a thing is, is also the thing - the whole of the shadow - and how far down the shadow goes into the ground. The snail on the sidewalk come to eat a little orange peel in the low streetlight (down the street) had a big shadow on the texture of the concrete / those three parts had a clear outline and one nature. Solved my enigma about shadows. Also just began it. There was a smear on the pavement near the snail, a shape like the snail's - but no orange peel, no shadow. In the park I was thinking how this neighbourhood has only certain paths for me. I smoked and found another path (sounds like Paul) along the baseball area to the freight sheds and further, a road, with the red and yellow towers all in one clump - moonlight the shock of memory of moon from a farm yard - stepping out - wonderful - to pee. Outside weather/light existing clouds running that cold thrilling shock of full moon. The familiar thoughtform about how childhood had the world so immediate - was it always? Or only during the lucid remembered times? 17 the ways overlap childhood's vivid world and abstract understanding - I think in geniuses right people the world stays while the functionary arrives. That's travel, I thought, taking the strange paths, which the beings who made the paths never use in the same way the traveler does, but have networks so that for each dweller, road maker, a different space exists. Space, I thought. In childhood it's sometimes so real, jumping out of the car and straight into the trees, up the hill (the poor man, having to take all of us with him). In adults space is not open in that way, it only has routes, projects, and sights. What I have to do in my life is something so I'll travel, I'll use my hard brain, feel forms so I'll connect things in all direction. It has to feel like very real work with actual particular challenges. And that, I thought, has got to do with paths. Cheryl hello to you pushing off into the scratchy bushes - salmonberry - taking paths nobody takes. Making paths. By what signs do I know that a path is arriving / a good path. By good people's thanks and pleasure. That's simple, it is still feeling/thinking form. And it has everything to do with the life / and touching depths so that people know where they've been. If a thought is taken into language does it become a path. - [letter to my mom] 17 May Dear M, there's so much to tell. Want to tell you on the phone and know I couldn't pay the bill so most of it will have to go untold because I'm writing and can hardly stop and so excited and high because of having found such happy work to do. Just now I was talking to Janeen on the telephone and that's a joy because I always loved her so much and felt so inferior to her and now it is all different and I know I have something I can give her. When I had my reading at the coffeehouse a few weeks ago she came into town to hear it. She was shy and nervous but as beautiful as always and still the person she was, although burdened and silenced by her life as a wife and two children's mum. I was overjoyed, no not overjoyed, I can't imagine there being such a thing as too much joy - or does it mean joy over all - well it was a sort of joy over all, because my friends came and brought their friends, and I read my work comfortably because I liked it. And then Josie did a performance that she'd invented while I was writing what I read. And then we both opened wine bottles and passed them around the coffeehouse to say we were glad they had come to hear what we had to say, and everyone was warmed and happy. And then we went to a place where there was Greek dancing and at 2 a.m. Janeen went home delighted with her night in the outside world. I think what I have to give her now is just to remind her of what she is and what she wants and have good times with her that aren't part of her daily life. We, Trudy, Cheryl, their friend Rhoda, Cheryl's ex-husband and some other friends, have been having a series of salons, one every Sunday afternoon. One person a week shows their work on Rhoda's walls, we sit and look at it and look at each other often uncomfortably but always intensely and interestedly. Every week is very different, sometimes boisterous, sometimes harmonious, people enlarging the boundaries of their acquaintance with each other. Children come and go. We all think hard about what is happening with everyone else. It's a sort of pleasure to meet around our work, though not easy, it is so delicate and sensitive. My week is at the end of the series. What I'm going to do is invite my friends who aren't part of that group, Josie and Paul, to show their work on the walls, and I am going to be brave and read what I write. I am so inspired to have something to write for - At this moment an English filmmaker friend on tour showing his films is staying here having fun with Luke. [Mike Dunford] At this moment he is at the laundromat doing my and his laundry. I am taking him around trying to imagine what he'd like to see and know in this place. Don and Olivia have been on my mind lately. I wonder what's up. Life is very strange and interesting these days. Sometimes I feel as if something astounding has happened ot me, to make things clear and conscious in me that were not comprehensible before. Sometimes I feel I have made a circle back to a much earlier time in my life. Sometimes I feel that my life has been a dream or story which just goes on and on. Sometimes I feel as if the world has become strangely volatile, as the mystics have seen it, and at the same time strangely mental. I don't know what to make of any of it but I know it has given me back the curiosity and marvel that I've had in my favorite times. I'm looking forward to coming north and applying my new eyes to that new/old world. Luke is so beautiful these days it almost hurts to look at him, he has such a shine of health and is so full of humor and truthfulness I am amazed to find myself in a life where he is my son. But I have the same shine, when I look in the mirror, and suddenly there is very little in the world that I am afraid of. In some ways I feel as if my life is complete and I could die satisfied. But also I feel as if it is just beginning and I have the extraordinary thrill and challenge of continuing to find out what to do with it. Writing and making films. For a while. What is happening with you? What do you think of all this? What are you thinking and doing? How did your visit here feel and seem to you after you went home? I was glad to hear about Elizabeth Voth. I keep telling you (maybe that's why you don't do it), try that yoga book, all the exercises. It will help with your feelings of dullness and insecurity. It's good that you won't take drugs, but you need something to help your struggle between conscious and unconscious as it lives in your body. Just try it every day for a month and see what happens. Your conflicts are written into your body and sometimes you can erase them just by stretching a muscle. Miraculously enough energy can resolve anything. Just try it faithfully for a while to give your prayers some practical assistance. Can't seem to get through a letter without giving you advice - sorry. Love - - [back to journal] The slide show Obey the instructions of each slide 'I' took these slides. They send me, each one, to their own address. They are then, when I saw and took and didn't know what I had seen, but put it there for me to find her again. Always high and feeling direct, always an ecstasy and often an idea. Every slide has a time around it Every slide has a space around it Where exactly does it put me I have never seen any of my slides A slide is an orienter. You're standing here, facing this way How to make it a game they're playing. Direct? This is an autobiographical movie Aim the projector from the eye like a camera Space is my oldest love The young girl bringing back the sense of loved rooms, this bed in another bed's position I look backwards these days to see myself. The tide is going back and picking her up where she still is, each of those 'young girls' - each of those Using external description to tell the story of what was inner 'or the other way'. Thinking that was both external and internals, doing something I don't know I'm doing. Inner then supplies perception of the evidence. All the thinking but not catching the thoughts. I need to catch them because they are my actual destiny. And think about what comes to be thought about, or else it will all have to stop. Revolve the thoughts to make them more real as paths the delicate antlers. The way snow runs in front of a drift. Luke and I a winter in La Glace. The subtlety. Of Trudy. Laughing. When Roy would hit me so hard on the side of the head I couldn't believe someone would want to damage my brain, but he did. No I won't think - whether Roy was - watch those - really evil or not. A passion means what? The answer of course is that Roy is actually split very deep between bad and good? The appalling things he said when he was drunk - I didn't write! To imagine the meaning of that time - head and shoulders above the crowd. I have never know anyone who enjoyed science so sensuously as Einstein. De Broglie. Particles such as electrons were guided by matter waves - which produce the interference effects found in light studies. when interference effects add up they produce the preferred orbits (Bohr quantum jumps) in which particles movements according to laws of wave propagation. Crisis about indeterminacy in the subatomic world. I don't know why he should mind if it's so, it seems a lovely substructure. "Laws which compel the Good Lord to throw the dice in each individual case." Art actually like physics in that attraction attention - following attractions toward structures and the deep happiness of that. [slideshow sequence
- Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves. The advancing sieve of time coagulates waves into particles at the moment now. Einstein 'saw' into physics directly refusing to bow but taking the music score, then bending it forward so it was Schubert who acknowledged the applause. He had no sense of direction. Bergson once said of him that he had made discoveries at a greater distance from the ordinary organs of human knowledge than any other man in history. I don't really know enough about my religious feelings. I have always known exactly what I should do and I feel satisfied with that. Secularization, worldliness "Intellectual women did not attract him; out of pity he was attracted to women who did physical work" said his wife. The life of Mrs Einstein When a man after long years of searching chances upon a thought which discloses something of the beauty of this mysterious universe he should not therefore be personally be celebrated. He is already sufficiently repaid by his experience of seeking and finding. The relation of light to gravity Today it is generally felt that the structure of the universe cannot be described using a single set of equations. Laws of gravitation, of electricity and magnetism I am at last beginning to understand that nature's formation of me is more interesting than what I have thought was my own; although of course that thought was also nature's, and my pleasure in being free of it is nature's too.
What I want to know in everything ultimately seems to be the structure, it could be math but more likely a diagram with few lines - in my early life I knew no one was like me, Janeen and I both, together, trying to make ourselves citizens in another world. Josie made me imagine how crazy I am by other folks' standards, Einstein book was comforting. Now I wonder if I was always crazy - the kitchen in my house has become an empty room - stove and refrigerator, and my lightshow apparatus! It makes me laugh when I think of Daphne's sane house and other people's kitchens. Where I could go if someone would look after me! Several times a week, not every week, someone tells me I'm beautiful. Stoned, I can look at these pictures and feel possibility of understanding them. I remember the free life, beautiful Luke, but it isn't long until he goes and then I can be myself without medicine. Sainthood - madness, they say are on either end with normal people between, but who knows. Imagining Dee, her unvisible genius her simple heartbreak, she didn't fight enough that's what she didn't have, she felt sorry for herself - but the secret Dee is so brilliant. Thinking about music, the finest - music is not for instruction but for joy, what madness doubts it - must be when the composer is most faithful to ecstasy in the most structurally developed way (ie intelligent) - "He had musically and technically such beautiful ideas." Does Luke oppress - flatten - me so much because he is less intelligent than I am or because we haven't found a way to be direct with each other. What they call beauty - it looks like that to me too - is just a visible call for friends of my own mind, I haven't understood that I deserve to know those who are beautiful by simply having seen their beauty - although by that argument Fred deserves me. Filming - what is there here at this moment, to love to see.
Marriages can only happen between two realized people. The other kind that's real is two innocent souls becoming versions of one soul. Everything else has to be pain. Daphne said going into a poem is like going into a house, you go in and look around and there are doors & wisdoms. She says when she writes she is Gradually they learned the pleasure of fewer and fewer words. They made no mistakes, they always knew where to find each other. Thus marriage revealed them to themselves and the world had no more lacks for them. Event. The poppy dropped one petal onto the magnifying glass now it is turning and sliding it still has life in it Giordano Bruno the Dominican who knew about other solar systems. He never looked through a telescope. "I believe in angels because Joan saw them." Galileo heard a telescope had been invented in another country. He then reinvented it himself. Galileo the first one to see the moon. Published Siderius Nuncius the Star Messenger. We imagine the atoms in straight lines but they are closest packings and therefore curved lines and straight lines. The Queen speaks to the Prime Minister every Tuesday evening. Nobody in the household had ever seen where she sat and he sat. Se faire/constituer une personnalité entierement de ce qu'on aime Your liegeman of earthly worship - from the investiture Films. Music and images. To reveal texture of music. The planets.
Jeans. The universe is not the interior of the soap bubble but its surface, and we must always remember that, while the surface of the soap bubble has only two dimensions, the universe bubble has 4 - 3 dimensions of space and one of time. And the substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded onto empty time. Galileo, Descartes, Milton contemporary Hallucinogens, as telescopes. Some people do not need them. Galileo turned his telescope on the stars. That is: 1609. Just provide the ships, or suitable sails for the air of the heavens, and there surely will be men without fear of the horrible void. Let us therefore devise an astronomy for the courageous travelers as if they were already at the door, I, that of the moon, you Galileo, that of Jupiter. Kepler to Galileo I'm so interested in that period. The corona of the sun - these marvelous tales - extremely thin gas around the sun, that reaches sometimes beyond the earth's orbit. We then move in the veils of the corona's outermost margins. Maybe connected to the northern lights. Solar plasma. Tales of explorers and visionaries that I'm seeking out simply to tell me not to be afraid. To ride my joy as close as I can. And that be the life. The ethereal firm ament firm because all those parts are held together as close as atoms. Can we enter it without danger of destroying it? No. The scale of destructability is moving outward, but it doesn't matter. The scale of death is always one. The sun - gasball - ROTATES on its axis in four weeks. At the equator 25 days at the poles 30. Sunspots in cycles. "Look flowerlike." They worked out the speed of light as a result of seeing the moons of Jupiter, which were slower when the earth was farthest from Jupiter. The Russians burnt up a dog in Sputnick 2 after 162 days. It starved first I suppose. It didn't volunteer. Escape velocity. The speed that takes you out of gravity. There is another number for the speed that would take you out of the solar system. The 14-day night of the moon. Photon propulsion might make this feasible, it supposedly is capable of accumulating the seemingly minimal pressure of light. Tail of a comet - no matter which way it's going, the tail will point away from the sun. A satellite in synchronous orbit staying perpetually above the Christmas Islands where it is always Christmas night and day. "during his space walk, with a hand-held camera" We live as on the bottom of an ocean and what lies outside can only dimly penetrate. Seventy miles out, there is already twilight. Air is so thin that it no longer transmits sound. Dish antennas. Two narrow windows into space. Light waves of a certain length. Radio emissions of certain wavelengths. Other wavelengths are stopped by the atmosphere. - Microscopy. We can imagine sperm as an animal, but egg more like a stone. Marriage of animal and stone. Every living thing of a certain organization requires this conjunction of what is animal and what is not exactly animal. In the cortex, the pyramidal cells. Thunder is electronic music. After having crystallized many hundreds of times a preparation of the same substance, one begins to penetrate its ways. Entities. The smallest to the largest each an entity and part of another entity. It isn't likely that only this layer has consciousness. One layer so thoroughly researched and made. So many people inventing bacteria, antibodies, cars. Other people not at home there but not having a researched collective method/life/thought to work from. Stubbornly (nothing to do with will) following desires. -
- Grief and loneliness, fatigue and desolation. When she came in I wanted to smash her head, so trim and tidy oh break her head for how it refuses me her body, and all I need of it is to hold it and she refuses that, to make me pain and that's all. The strange thing is its original ambivalence. I knew it all at the beginning, I mean, with the first dream. So what's taken me so far into humiliation, with it, the power of the body, is all, I don't want her oblivion arrogance greed stiffness. She's never once known how to touch me. The blind wise utter need to have her body close, she's right, if I had enough of it I'd be free. I couldn't believe her cruelty. The only way it could have been was war, and if I'd won, I'd have gotten to hold her. Her way. I'd have had to do it like Trudy did. It's funny that it's her only language. How is it? Systematic withhold. It's because I don't find her in her furthest place nor does she me. What a sad comedy once more fools fooled. But it went so deep and made me so infantile and so close to my hungers and these are such lonely times. One demon lover deserving another. Does it have to be that? Accepting the violence the sibling rivalry catastrophe. - Make something beautiful, the glass box and she comes and lies with me in it, the new manifestation of Artemis strong sound Artemis lies in the glass box, on her elbow on her side, she likes me strokes my arm looks in my eyes we go down into some warm bright water, we can hear its sighs. Then we swam, just forward in that warm water. - Cinema x-ray. X-ray radiation very short wavelength. Interference patterns could only be produced by passing it through crystals. - Sunday [my show with Josie at Rhoda's salon in Kits]. The worse of it the zombies. All the phantoms unsettled everyone of them a secret soul, all impersonating people and all feeling ashamed to do it, and I was desperate, except that Jam mentioned the Neoplatonists and out of that I made up that she'd said I was one, so I could feel I'd been seen, and other people said things and I took it as a pain and Tony got friendly, but so blandly, and Paul said it was the most invigorating thing that had happened to him in a long time, in a lying voice; and Rhoda said it was brave and I looked hard at her to see if she knew what she meant; and Tony saw. And Jam said she saw my face: she saw something for sure. And Daphne laughed when she saw the electric kettle; and Josie had a good presence but was somehow evasive and collusive with me along with the kindness; and Janeen was oblivious and absent, stunned and lovely (where does she go) saying everything is beautiful. And my two skinny friends that I love so much and miss so much and am in so much grief about my separation from, and no one is them or satisfies me, no one is real for me as they are, and I can't get close to them anymore it seems and my life is a pain to me on account of that. Zoe gave me flowers. Because I can't imagine who'd recognize me, and it has to be that. I am ashamed for them, I am ashamed to be in that with them. The world is only real when I am with this one. To shine my light. It takes so much fight, to cut through. Jam said They're all about what light does. I am all about what my light does and doesn't. How stupid I am. - The dream, Gertrude's bank and mine closed. Having to move on to a hilltop. - Bachelard the provincial. He began in philosophy of science. - This funny question and it's not real either; have to understand it. The dreams I had. Trying to sell myself, first to a man, then a woman. I wouldn't have him because he was too sick and I wouldn't have her because she fancied cripples. Today I feel that we didn't meet because I was not paying attention. She is easy in her skin in a way they're not, I didn't know to expect it. I guess I know she thinks of it as a trip to the bank. Both versions were true, the sick man with bad breath, and the fear of the anemic cripple-lover. With Roy the herald dream was pure good. o scarlet pimpernel o scarlet scarlet my lover the poppy jump out of ambush there is only the beautiful present these lives jumping up inside minutes this being to ride lynx weasel snake (too) to hold the face of kiss kiss more and more high wind I'm calling What do you keep in the bank? Your disguises. Maybe not. Maybe that's where you keep the schoolgirl laughing handovermouth girl light into wellwater girl I'll cut your hair you're very long from here to here "What am I talking about everything I do is automatic writing." Two eldest daughters, the fairytale tellers. The queens of underground laughing and laughing. Let's climb and camp let's go somewhere. "What do you know about ..." everything. Originator you've got a wild imagination too. Never got along with your mother. In Penthouse they get closer to pictures of actual sex. She likes response. Josie likes response. What is so beautiful about refusal. The white house with lace on the washline. What house and its line right back out to the shed, and all sizes of white lace hung on it. The dyke; that's me, takin' off my jacket on the freeway to use my nipples to stop a schoolteacher - The dyke in Yarrow, willow flowers mud gravel stones water flat boiling such shades of brown and blue, thinking about the movie work and how to see that place, all the invisible parts ie just that willow poplar fireweed and all the common things mud with tracks in it. The smell. What is it like to be there, the being there. Phenomenology movies. And Janeen's. The secret inside of Janeen is a hunger to be worshipped as a goddess of beauty. "My life is quickly sailing away from what I liked best. In Los Angeles it was really thrilling, the men would stare right through you." They would see everything she had. When she was a child five men surrounded and adored and were her daddies. The brothers of the man who married late, an ugly woman, and out of her made exquisite babydoll Janeen a very good mind but enslaved to the idea of her own real sexy beauty. I wonder if she is really just a sexual genius or whether her look is really just a look of helplessness that makes her easy to ravish a ravishing girl. "Gary's years seemed to suddenly hit him at the wedding around that time he looked very young but suddenly the weight of life or something ." Now in his shambling bear he's got a lovely fantasy and is lonely, with his princess and she in her awkwardness too and that flinty cool graceful daughter like neither of them with eyes like a buyer's - and Benjy's dreams of lumbertrucks. She is hidden and strikes out suddenly. She looks just the same, she is just the same, there's no life in her. In her art a perfect narcissism, it's lovely ladies still. But she remembers the free girl Norma Bakstead whose parents moved so she wouldn't have to walk a long way to the bus - that girl was full of dreams of ranches, they had black pebbles and white pebbles, they were horses and when they galloped those pebbles, Janeen said, she was on a horse on the edge of a canyon in Wyoming. Norma half an Indian and in trouble with the school, came home humiliated by Mrs Maple, stuffed a pillow under her high school sweater and imitated Mrs Maple. "Oh look at Norma, she can really do that." And Janeen, sick, in the little house on our land, Mrs Bakstead gave her True Story magazines and movie magazines, "Here's another one for you." Those people lived in a way that belonged to the place. Forbidden people. The Farnsworths. Phantoms. Jam. Daphne. Tony. By their eagerness I could tell - . But her. Candy! "I was very moved," the hard one. Saw/told. - The man who pulled up said I'm going to Clearbrook, he had something that gave me such a merriment, "That's a good idea" I said, and laughed and got in and said "I'll go see my grandma" and he drove me - wanted to - right into the driveway, and Oma came around the corner (is it going possibly - to be - ?) and laughed too and hugged me a lot and started putting pots on the stove. He showed me again the pictures of his one (of 9) surviving Geschwister (I think I could work with her, she has a good hard - ) Questions - what do you know about - ? He speaks and thinks of his brother, his young brother, who's coming. (But so manly, is she oblivious?) We sat at the table and laughed round open laughing he as much as she; I flirted with her, they told stories of Margaret Janzen working for the Postman boys. She walked home one summer evening, she wanted to talk to them about something, Peter and Luise were there at the time, and she couldn't speak, so she walked home and it began to rain and she caught Nahrenenzindung, brain fever I think, and went to the hospital shrieking and screaming with the pain. The boys took her and telephoned to Larsen's store, and Peter Konrad on his way home, he'd been there at the time, met the Janzen father and told him, "Go to ---- at get him to take you in his Auto, she's very sick, be sure to take your wife, because she's very sick." He emphasized, "I told him, be sure to take your wife. Das ist die Mama." So the wife went and sat with the girl and she found her way in the end. "Sie hatten den Weg ein bischen gelassen aber sie ist zurecht Heim gegangen." "Ja" says Opa, "sie hat' Friede gefunden." And from there to the story of Helen and how no one was with her and she prayed in delirium until she died. We had tears in our eyes and yet at the next moment Oma was telling a funny story and stroking my hand. and the story of the twins. And Oma's pleasure in Anne's writing. And how the children had a hard time because they lernten so gut, and I said we'd had a hard time too, and she said "Ja, ich weis das." Sitting at the table just the three. They took me to the parking lot where the bus stops and I leaned over the back seat and kissed her on the mouth and him on the cheek and her palm - sudden coquette - on the back of the seat and got out and waved very much and they went to church and I waited with my rose for the bus. Grandma looked in here and I caught her and she said "Ich konnte nichts verstehen." She said it enough times so I suspected she'd understood something interesting. Her manner is like a petted child with me, confident that she's loved. Rather like Trudy. - He stood at the grave and cried and cried. They paid for the funeral. Yes, they paid for the hospital too, "haben alles bezahlt." -
- George Postman on a horse, burnt trees behind. A little house covered with vines, such a lot of bare space around it. What's the voice that says such. There was a wedding picture, some grey tone quite faded, an awkward man with a cigarette in his hand, a broadjawed woman looking unhappy in the upper corner like a prophecy a corner of a window with a child's face in it very dim. Janeen had never seen it - another mark or slight fading that might be another face. The woman died of complications. She was George Postman's sister. When George and Pauline married they took the surviving little boy with them on the honeymoon. On a streak of whitewash in the shed George in his European handwriting wrote "We left here [date] When we'll be back who knows?" It was a custom among the brothers. To get to that country I have to go past the Mennonites who held out separate. As they my beauties do. This world is not my home I'm only passing through. Pauline's bitterness at cooking and washing for the big family of brothers who loved each other foremost. Uncle Henk, Uncle Albert after a while married and moved. The photograph of Janeen hands in the suds, the men looking on, Pauline barbering Henk Bennink. "I asked Marlys to take it because I wanted to be in a picture with him." She has a beautiful look on her face. Janeen's style has stuck on the time in her early marriage. You haven't changed at all her friends say. But she has a fine unexpected forthright humor that her looks say nothing of. Her face has got hollow in the jaws while her body is filled out back to its original shape, heavy in the haunch. - I have to take in this Vancouver scene it seems because it pressures me and I'm from somewhere else, but I chose to come here. I don't want its voice but I doubt my former voices and dislike Paul's support of them. And love the style and flash of T and C Vancouver. BP says of Jung that he loves mystery and wants to stay in it and be in it. Finding one's way. Here I am inside me, traveling. Somehow reluctant to take myself on and yet knowing it's the only way to have actually been here. And sick in my belly with fear and pain. It's an early work it predates me. BP [Nichol] Kinetics of language I think there are research writers, synthesizers ("take that material and synthesize it and do incredible things with it") and popularizers. The noun of anything is the verb to be. BP "I hid out." A ground of my own and safe in that way. Aesthetics gets into bias.
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