| dames rocket 7 part 3 - summer 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
The hinge or clasp of an oyster shell, only the hinge on a pedestal, the sort of glassy material the shell lining is. Arms fitted at the hand. Find historical material on Peace River Country Working. Invent the method now. Frankel "the images that ruled that place" Risks taken but never presented too rawly, rather worked out with patience and love. Snow inquiry into the modes of seeing, reflecting, remembering, recording, composing, projecting. Nancy Graves films
- Nature poetry is seldom about nature. Ie poet's stance. Sublime vs Gertrude Sequence/process: "He lets things fall where they may." What's interesting is not codifying but experiencing and understanding the nature of passages from one state to another without acknowledging 'beginning.' [Michael Snow somewhere] I often have a kind of wrap-up intuition of the nature of an event. It was given to me to know ... Bird like alarm clock. Use it to wake. Huxley. In the stone I see understandings but they're instantly gone. The difference of sense of grasp. And not. - The Architect! Capitalized characters are professions imagined as presences. Working in clarifying: Lessing, Rhoda, Wordsworth, Tony Working in fascinating: Satan, God, Jam, me, Eisenstein, advertising, Don Juan, Andy, Madeleine, Agee No this doesn't work. Find out why. The secret crimes of consciousness, by conscience.
Wanting to move They are trying to deny (the structuralists) that they want to be magicians. M Snow is so good because he's pretending to be a structuralist while actually a magician. Ie the fascination of making clear. Natural selection. In consciousness fascination is the mode I liked best, therefore it's the mode I should make movies in. It does not refer to the past or future. M Snow works on modes of making conscious the silent speech. What I'm saying is fascination for the 'work' and Novels are all lies, says Grandfather. Is Grandfather actually very wise? And present. Ask him what he means. Die Kunst wirt alles nur zerschtraft. Technical writers and writers who I would like to make a real house. (I am an architect) builder. -
I sometimes think is it like this for you, feeling out. Being an artist is a reasonable employment while following and watching the life - I think of wonder, marvel, as the holiest mind (revision - best), the one to steer toward. - Imagine if there's a natural selection of mentality, that in every encounter one of the minds wins (if they are close enough to be able to see one another). One of the persons goes into the other, has a practice in it, and returns home so that those with the most interesting mentality When this book is done read it. It came through me. Write a summary of what's to know. Architecture and décor. An architect who Ear massage by eyebrows J in the writing you are writing messages to yourself. When you get the message Do you feel worthy to teach? Inchworm appeared on my cuff had been there a long time. Makes an [sketch] omega sign. The dreams. The waking. This journal is trying to bring back something useful, a knowledge of the way it goes. Grandfather K actually very smart, the two of them. Ask him questions, interview. Ask her if it was something in his mind. They were happily married without fights. Are they bored with their children. "Du! Horch' mal!" Mary is stupid with them. All gods! Listen to me, all I want is to be able to taste what is present at every moment. Let me stay in heaven. Help me see everything. Everything we do is build something in our souls, as we imagine them. But all we have is our soul, we can't build it. Eventually my art could become my life. When it's time. Art in life [sketch] Given to think about (say Grandpa)
Could find out what each means in terms of attitude and question. A suite of lifeworks in these. Relatives and their family voices. What is the presence one has with family. Familiarity, out of a different apprehension. (Thought of child and the rest.) Lifeworks. They have information but what they offer is the possibility of taking that. The model I'm in when I'm stoned. Make questions in one mind to answer in another. Find questions in this mind to supercede those in the other.
Gertrude Stein writes as legends are written, exactly, not telling the ways a person is described (body, clothing, vision) but only the essence of their message or meaning as variant. Steiner has clues for vision-pieces: describe a thing so it's imagined, then show it printed as subtitle. What things? You and I. To let oneself be interested in the lover. I don't believe she was so glad to have me read it. Watch for the sensation of unbelieving pleasure. - Gertrude Stein 1925 The making of Americans Contact Press We are always young adults to ourselves. Our friends too. Old people are old or children. Knowing what to do for children Leaving origins - "never can feel it real to himself, things as they were in his early manhood, now that he has made his life and habits" - "his feelings all so different." Being there, I'm an immigrant. The young ones have in them My mother and the dirty foot, the doctor's dainty hands It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it. They loved and admired and respected each other very much this daughter and her father. They understood very well both of them how to please while they were combatting with each other. He had all the emotion and the important feeling, it was just like religion. the mixing of people in marriage Nor could she know what they needed inside of them. But they were never very loving to her inside them. They had it too strongly in them to win their own freedom. from his strong love of starting and the uncertain things he had inside him the important feeling he had always inside him from his continual thinking and in a different way from that in which all the other people around him were thinking The ten acres with roses all the way around Her children were to her like well to do living, not important to her feeling. Locating the important feeling to explain anything to him or to get him to agree to any new thing in their living Stein has it, the language without action. Only temperament. from the natural way of living it had come to all the rest of them to be leading - J - I suddenly thought you're using the thesis to write messages to yourself and it will be done when you've read it accurately. The thing about fucking that makes it hard is not talking, a convention forcing us? So that we have less connection than ordinarily. We could do it as anything we make together, sharing. We'd have to be brave and tempt the gods with learning to make fire ourselves. I do want to know something about who you were with Sandy, what's a power for you and whether it was a sort of lapse. Knitting into holes. The outer eye, yours. I can watch, what it tells me. You have Joyce I had the women's movement, our falls from grace. - For her it was not religion, it was the right way to do in the business of living. so that she would do what was right to do to her feeling. There not being enough in each one of them to fill out the inside of them and so they did not have much meaning or any power or any sense of appealing the kind of woman he could find to be contenting to him A woman had to be a part of the inside of him to content him. She had to have a power in her, to give him a feeling. Such a woman always did it for him by entering into him by brilliant seductive managing, and so she was a part of him. who came close to them In every family of them some of them had an uncertain something in them but perhaps the rest understood it about them They have such an uncertain feeling coming out from them, they are not real in existing They need men to give to them a feeling of existing in them Was Gertrude ever afraid? each of the three girls who had been once inside her, not of her then Anna had then beauty in her and was important then to everyone who knew her. The three children were more entirely of them, the poorer people who lived around them, than they were of their mother then. the sense of bigness as all the world around them. Some have such a sense in them only when a new thing begins in them, soon they lose it out of them. There are some who have such a feeling in them when they are first beginning their individual being. In some of such ones of them it comes in their later living to be only impatient feeling. when they are old and weakening they have not any success in them and it needs others then to make them feel again inside them. the bottom nature and the mixture of other kinds of natures It comes out in the old (what did Andy say I would more and more become?) That the nature in him would not carry him to the last end of fighting which is winning. when his wife was no longer in him as a tender feeling - From a distance watch a naked crippled woman at a tent. Dwoskin. Gertrude wouldn't be shy to talk of crippled. - Luke. I slept out from under Making of Americans, came back with a dismay, feeling of oh Luke the death card. I watched him play with the cards. He was interested in the swords, the knights, and the death card. I watched shocked while he pointed it out. "And that's a funny one, what's that skeleton doing in armour" in his false English voice of his alienation, oh Luke I'm not providing for you, the pain that would turn into guilt. I couldn't want to keep him, when he came I wanted to welcome him and asked him. He said carefully (as Peter Lessing) "What do you want me to do?" "I need a longer rest." "Then I want you to have a longer rest." And lovely Roy, I wouldn't give him more than I thought he gave, my meanness. It didn't come to me to feel them and now it comes to me to grieve that I couldn't, they are my family, the record of my joy. I forget what a joy there was in me - was it like that for you? With Sandy or? A deep place. All the deep places have so much grief in them, is that what you mean, C? I'm sleeping, go away. Crossly. I'm working, I can't talk to you now. You died in me. As long as you don't die in you I can let you go, but does your life need me to want you? And if it does, is this a tragedy? The story of Luke. - Dream, after finding it, willing to be hungry. The dead princess. Oh I see what it is, she has those thoughts (of minerals, stones, crystal: structure, bone) but they're very far away in her (she's mired in the social) (ie anxiety) but we described her patronizingly and weren't about to take on her birth into stone. Paul went through, I thought the same of him. Going to the river, next to the hospital. Both of us dressed as teenagers, anxiously. I was in knit hot pants and garters. She, Sarah, J. The man who wanted us to pay gross dumb lascivious patriarch, J with two big copper tuppence going to phone for permission, on the bleachers, back we want to --- in but (stones on the bottom) we have to make the bed first, wide bed, difficult to make because there's a little girl in it lonely in a hospital bed with her treasures (the gifts of experience), a locket exactly like my mother's but with different brown pictures in. I sat with her to look at the brown photographs. Woke very wide and recalled dream of course understood it and then went right to understanding why Trapline is exactly erotic, very excited and inspired J. Much mental energy. In the fucking was overwhelmed with how much I have, and afraid of not having a lack only fullness and exhaustion. -
What he's like, what she's like, the account focused. Asked tarot about the helping problem. Was given 4 pentacles, a hunchback miser sitting with a foot each on a pentacle holding tight and showing another, with one on his little crown, a big shawl and a look of a woman. Something like J's expression. City towers and greyness. But drunk and tired. My voice got very low down talking about it because it's global. I said that when I found my way I would stop art and do that.
I must keep doing art until I find all my range and companionship. Does tarot only tell me what I feel of the moment and nothing of the future? - Listening with J to the Agnus Dei and having her describe how it was. A gnomon and finding it to tell her. The sequence as I saw (we're building a house). How long we travailed before we broke in about my movies and what I understood about oneirism and fascination. Fairies and angels. How she isn't interested in language. (Yesterday her way of hidden beautifulness.) R as clown and not writing that story. Sandy as telephone operator. What is the question I should be asking. King of pentacles. For me these queens and kings rule only a territory, no people. Being afraid that our competence to follow each other will fail when it matters most. I said at least we will then find ourselves alone at the edge of our known territory. Sky. What it means to find it again and again. We used smoke to whirl and confess ourselves dis/re orient. Goodness of Ezra. - If I'm being trained it is in penetration, managing own and friends energy. Pattern recognition. Structure detection. Dream and world, travel, tuning. Glug. Why's it pious. - Daphne's complex household getting out a plate to eat with her and her exhusband. Sense of her Mexico piece. On the road noticing rebuilding a second story on Grandpa Peter Epp's house. Walking through it said this is a dream, I can be perfectly free to see and do what I want. On the road there had been an urchin girl. Remembering the power urchin children have. Luke unfolding an ear. Daphne. [She had lent me Zocalo in manuscript.] Why the dream section is so much more powerfully written as if it happened differently. Is the power of description of a moment an indication of the nearness to 'centre' of the mode it was in. Daphne Marlatt 1977 Zocalo Coach House Bones in a tree, the cathedral She and I exchanged. "Too small, too small ..." the fiery house, the mountainous house, the dark house Trees and grass as pelt Fighting to win the right to go to the gods. The four corners earth falls into, they stand for the disappearing points. That is the furthest she or anyone else can go. Except at centre, where the central tree grows Divination by presence She will not be tricked, she will stay where the world is and they are all together. so that she enters an inner room made of his smell She must not step into that house again. Tell (the dream, the account of the dream)
What are we here for? To be trained in travel. What are we being trained for, if there are no acts.
- The dream of J marrying into an awful family, my distress. You'll have to be willing to do it in pain and vulnerability (ie the university work): at the same night she dreams she and I are in a theatre and she accidentally steps on stage, with keeping history and accounts there's so much to account for. Sister or friend and lights come on and I light up. We go into irrelevancy. Learning to give up analogy, history. What that has to do with Daphne. Ie to please me she must show herself. Dreams like two halves.
Telling about dying, whether we could do it together, she assumed meeting on the other side, I thought of whether going together, we'd miss it, and she'd thought the same. - Recirculate their work. Daven, Roshoshanna. Oldenburg. Taking a thing and modulating it though the possibilities of matter, movement, size, material, open/closed. Dream after the day in which Candy, Diana, Daphne, Cheryl, Zoe plus all the people I called in Andy, M, Father and Jam - a birthday party, mine, people kept arriving from the ends of my life Greg looking tight and beautiful, found. I noticed they didn't bring presents. Two strangers came in, very tall, with black hats like Mormons. I knew they were evangelizing, confronted them, told them to go away, knocked on the stomach of one, was irate, shouting "This is a birthday party, go away." He said looking down from very high up "Don't do that" gently. Next thing I knew they were sitting down talking to one of the men, I was so cross they'd done that familiar thing I shouted "This is not the man of the house, I am the man of the house, at this moment, and I want you to go away!" They quietly went but I was left feeling I'd been out of control and silly, and when I turned back to the birthday party, it had dispersed, the room was full of strangers doing different things, as the common room at University College. Daphne's dream. She comes, at night, with Roy and a friend, to a piazza with a dark façade as if destroyed, ivy growing on it. She sees a light in one of the windows, intense, shining through a stained glass screen very blue, William Morris with flying birds. The friend says "Oh look the door is open." She goes in and the light - it is daylight, as if the door leads to the other side - falls on her blond face. She says "It's beautiful, come in, come in." Roy says to Daphne, "No don't go there, come away, she won't be able to come back." Daphne says "But the door is there." Roy takes her away, they don't turn to look when they hear her scream, they know the screen has moved over the door. I say "But how do you know she wants to come back?" -
Imagining the actual cosmologies of other peoples Greeks seemed to be living on an intuitively expansive planar world around and above which passed the sun and stars, after which they plunged into the sea and arose again in the morning. - In this life, as one revelation follows another, carried forward by the miracle of inward becoming truthfully outward. By necessity, crying for the breakthrough, battering each other in the ugly necessity of finding somewhere else to be together, offering each other symbolic gifts, whatever is in us is true and must be given and taken, the accurate aim we are, I am and in my movement see you being. "I've been trying to tell you." I had a dream of two men coming.
The avocado seed in which a cunt and a clit are secretly together. You left them open to eyes, me I hurried to close them together and you didn't fail to notice. With your translucent dragon on a pedestal. I was stronger and could go into the degradation and disgrace without refusing it. Yes I'm a woman yes you're a man yes I desire you in that secret dark that will make you shine, yes I think of having a baby in me by you orgiastic pleasure of full solar plexus burning woman right in the animal soul where satisfaction is. Fully. I looked at you and became a cavity, you watched me sink into shock, I saw my life with flares going up next to Roy, Mother, Luke, Paul. Yes I was saying I am that, I will be that, why are you looking at me with such a coldness, don't you love this wedding, how can you tell me you're a man and not ask me to marry you. "You're looking at me as if you're afraid of me." At the mercy of the man. At your mercy. Going alone to cry. You've led me here, without wanting me here. What is it, I'm wondering, is it The degradation of the woman has a secret power of presence with the world. Pain. You don't really want to marry a woman. Don't fall for it, she said. Be with me otherwise, don't sink. "You want this. I don't think it's too early to let you know that." I don't want it. "You were right, I let you go into it completely alone. (This will be very good for your work.)" "I was completely cold and hard." You need me to be the one. And the other. As I need to be the one and the other. Crossover of unfamiliar. The quaternity of mating.
There was once a man who fell in love with a woman who loved women. There was once a woman, who spoiled as a woman, looked among the spoiled men and found a woman. The woman was furious and became a man, ie became in soul what she was not in body, so that she was inaccessible in body. The mastery. "Oh we'll have to give you the pleasure of that." I have another experience. Perfect dance.
Your beauty when you come to yourself, I worked to bring you to it, and now that you are here you don't want it. "I feel like I'm the first person who has ever loved you back." "That's true."
There was a woman who married a very beautiful man. He was of course a man who craved women and didn't understand them. After two years a daughter was born to the couple. She turned the daughter into a separate life so that the daughter would have nothing of the father. When the daughter came home as a man, the mother had lost interest in her. But then the daughter took away from the mother the sequestered child she had been. The daughter in this way challenged the father, successfully, and regained the mother, in order to leave her. For the father. What was it moved you in the early days. A beautiful woman who sang in the morning. I didn't believe it. A woman who touched you boldly. "This must be driving you crazy. Will you touch yourself." I felt her not with me. Why don't you mind, have you given me up. Have you given me up. All of the story isn't yet made. I was so strong in the way I claimed you. Your man will want to destroy my power of woman. If I'm a woman who loves men, and you're a man without a man's body, that's a chute that sends me straight out of you. What Paul said, that it was a man he'd worry about. We looked at that in a pain of loss and you coldly. Yes. And then I brought again the possibility that you're the man I'm waiting for, and when I went out I realized you were using my opening to get rid of me, or to try to, and I realized I wasn't going. But you're dissatisfied. And I was uneasy, unconfident. The rug was pulled out from under. There was the beach. Its light. Sylvia Hotel. Saw the full contradiction I'd shut out of me, that what I am happily in full instinctive pleasure what I am in heart and centre is a woman who loves men, and that to express that ("the fully expressed woman") I would have to lose everything else, because as a woman I am not complete (because spoiled and therefore unconfident) (a hole, a gash) and therefore cannot resist the part of the man that wants to destroy me. Oh here I am, you've put me back in jail, you scorn me because as a woman I am feeble and frightened. It was dismay, dismay. When I ran out I remembered how I am also a man, but not a good one, not bold to gather you, as I was, but you don't let me, baby I'll have to make you faint.
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Are we jealous of one another as women? I think there is a reality and we are here to find it. We know nothing about sexuality. Whatever that place is, where we went, you have more power there, you want to be in gender with me because there you are stronger, and you want to be there in that raving sexual necessity that unnerves me.
When I went into sexuality you went out of it
What a spin. A swirl. I imagine you giving it to me in the world where we are magicians. Where I had you enthralled you want to get back at each other. Degradation. It's a certain kind of gendering. I'm not sure I did that with Tony. I feel I've been conned. Are she and Sandy doing this? The holy rumor says sexuality is good for us. There's a state better than sexuality. Making the body burn.
We are locked into combat, I feel tired already. You said you feel tired. We are set to degrade one another as well as to strive for each other's souls. The hate. You had shifted out of it when you phoned, I hadn't. Art is a trap too. We're here to see. But maybe have to do these things. What happened. I wasn't interested in the sequence. Omens. You've been pushing to go to that place, like a devil. Not love, but bound: we are at the moment, bound together by the story's line. We find each other in our days, a constancy.
I feel - and trusting it - then it turns into life
My journal resists me it tries to make me forget.
Then she tried to talk to me about writing, it shocked me. But before I left turning it into gender again. I can see you marching up the alley telling me the anger was "You don't know when you have mastery." Your separation into spirituality. Downgrade me spiritually. They trapped me into sexuality too, it is an elementary form of concentration/meditation. I wanted to upgrade you spiritually! To have a companion. That project is what buffets me with surprises because sometimes you're ahead and sometimes you're devil. Booze to dowse me. Douse. I put the concept of doubt. Temptations and what are they. Enchantment. Messenger. The work we're doing is work enough.
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