| dames rocket 8 part 2 - october - november 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Yeats 1893/1902 The Celtic twilight Fairies using mortals to participate in earthly being, as we use them to participate in unearthly A people using the body of a mortal as a door They came back out of the bodies of two men in dark clothes. - I said yes and was asked at a moment when I would. Afterthought to ask and she said, well, yes. But the truth was the first. You've been telling everyone but me. He wished to be always unknown, obscure, impersonal. a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the end of evening Lying with her head on the pillow I saw again the woman in the hospital, white, and the lovely head, and the red sack of blood. It was her. I told her I won't be with her till she dies and she grumbled that she wanted me to be. Marvel. She is a fairy. In the lane talking to her dog, head turned right and Ezra's to the left. Dying: the custom is to leave door or window open. in the Western tales is a whimsical grace. The people who recount them live in the most wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds.
It is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long. Madeleine [Murray] drawn to West Ireland The admired and desired are only safe if one says God bless them when one's eyes are upon them. Countrymen and countrywomen are many years closer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things. I imagine us by our trust making light in those we would meet and see. The stupor I was in, the first day I went, and today, speaking as if asleep but easily, and matching this time to yesterday. Thoughts about inventing the vows. I had other cautious thoughts yesterday but they didn't speak today. I submitted to the desire I had from the beginning, and wasn't afraid. She said she had palpitations, her hands and head were very hot. It's Monday the 24th of October, rained hard when we were first awake. When I woke I didn't know her. When I began to kiss her the kiss came through me like a snake lunging and fighting, the sensation of letting it loose. She was complaining that I kept something back, and I was, waiting for her to assure me. I struggled hard against their influence, and my head began to ache. The influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony with itself, in other words, evil. After a struggle I got rid of the black clouds and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again. The invoker appeared to be gradually increasing in power and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness was pouring from him and concentrating itself about me. "What would happen if one of your spirits had overpowered me?" "You would go out of this room with his character added to your own." Free from the intervention of sight, his mind turned every movement of the day and every change of public passion into rhyme or quaint saying. Because something speaks through me that is not my attention, slips of the tongue - a dizziness when I see what I am. C so gentled wearing curly hair, a loose pretty shirt. the Forgetful People, as the fairy people are sometimes called a very beautiful tall woman who came out of the cave I had learned from MacGregor Mathers and his pupils so to suspend the will that the imagination moved of itself. I bade the seeress lay her hand upon the breast of the queen, and after that she heard every word quite distinctly. Her people carry away mortals and put another in its place. "We change the bodies" was her answer. was slight and broad in the shoulders a kind of buskin a heroic beauty Those with their hair up have short dresses, you can see their legs up to the calf. Other kinds of ladies have long hair and long dresses. Robin's book. A teacher? He will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than ... Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. We shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. The way, reading, when the attention detaches from the page - eyes still moving on the page - and instead of looking through the page goes deflected into another part of the life. the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. But it had not the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or in speculation. a newborn baby or a new-wed bride happy, the story has it, but doomed to melt at the Last Judgment like a bright vapour, for the soul cannot live without sorrow. The gentry were covering him. Saw his mother working in a basement, she offered him food but he wouldn't eat because it would cast on him the glamour. They kept reminding Cheryl to eat. Telling my friend I didn't like to call her a name, and feel my own is irrelevant. She didn't have that difficulty with Sandy. Her rich laugh and fuschia sweater with green shirt, the deep feel of it. But overnight I don't love you. Gradually the warming. With David Larcher a fairy man I didn't mean to hurt them and hadn't time to decide whether it was right before demanding to know what Elizabeth thinks of the way he uses her and I think she's happy but patronized him not meaning to. It used me and I doubt, while at the same time I think that she picking up shit in his movie doesn't know how wise she is. His freedom giving it us. [David Larcher program at the Cinemateque] Mixed emotion makes us old. Love and hate with a good will. The Irish, who are water, can make our mind so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images. Even the generation of images in the mind is from water. I was won by a brave person. Who likes to know. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasonable impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in an argument. Go into holy marriage to allow / fucking for once in this life. So too will hero or saint because he works in his own flesh and blood. Our culture, with its doctrine of sincerity and self realization, made us gentle and passive. loves nothing but her destiny Religion is not properly work: it is only obedience. Art is obedience and will. A hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading hatches out a hawk-headed chicken, as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a monstrous birth. The soul by changes of vital congruity, More says, draws to it a certain thought, and this thought the sequence of many thoughts according to the intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing and this growth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of the soul. Creation, different from study. Creation by power and love. Study may find any feeble thing? Conceptual art. The toil of the living to free themselves from an endless sequence of objects, that of the dead to free themselves from an endless sequence of thoughts. Here Robin has put the initial J in the margin and a tale opened in me, of myself writing a book in which the reader discovered her lover's secret existence through the notations of the lover's friend in a borrowed reluctantly lent book. The J doesn't refer to her but to somebody else. - In company, the intensive gathering. J and I laid together sleeping afterwards dreamed, she that C was with her on a bench and I called to Cheryl from a great distance to say that none of them were big enough for me. C said to J, I think you are big enough for her, if she'll see it. I, that I was on a balcony with C, looking down at fat middleaged Germanic men running up bowling alleys full of water, with casseroles of food they set down on the concrete at the end (curtained doorway behind), stood over and peed down their pantlegs into. Cheryl was next to me silent for a little while, hooked her little finger against mine and went away. Came upstairs (C's new place), T was reading my journal aloud in an intelligent voice, looked guilty. I was irritated and said I'd left it there for them. Sense of C's evasion, T hiding her real respect. When they were here I kept looking to see is Cheryl laughing. R saying to J that she taught C and C used what she'd learned to take Trudy. J and C using a speech to cover their long look at each other. Being with and who is with and T calling everyone to be with her, come and eat me I'm so full of life. Saftig. I am in Jamila's dreams and she doesn't come in mine and then I don't know her when I wake but this morning I loved to see her face. And now the time will come when we share our doubts. Went to the opening dressed as an older woman, Maggie in her mulberry nightgown looking so fine. Engagement party. I told her I was happy. R's presence in her light body, a greyness with a shine in eyes. Judith the bewilderment swimming eyes with firm little statements issuing. T spreadlegged fat laughing at everything, a merry little soul, alight going into absurdity and coming out by a last fling with something quite firm and funny. Look of defiance. C flushed pink glowing at the head of the table, often not laughing, interested in Diana and J. T says, Does anybody want my seat? Yes says Jam, I do (next to C). They exchange places. "You said she would try to engage me in a way that left you out." In company the twice when two spoke, T and R together on the couch, E and J declaring chicken soup almost together. T dreaming that R and C were going after me and she said What about me? J's lovely conceit when they challenged her on stalking out. "If one of us had been there would we have seen you stalking?" "You'd have seen me striding, a stride is a short stalk, and my stalks are quite short you see." Watching C miss or double the wordplay. Drawing lessons with T. By being alone with her, doing it. A tandem. Book of the lives of x, y, z, a and b. Passionate moments recur, for passion desires its own recurrence more than any event.
This is inaccurate mythology. The sense of marriage as it is clear in me: something accomplished, peace of relief. Most people don't think of it. Now I can get on with my work, that task is done at last after its long delay. Quiet of relief. What it is now is wanting a contraction. If it isn't done the work has to be about it. Preoccupied with the relief. What actually happened with Roy: I met someone my spirit bowed to and was in apprenticeship with that magician. The same with T and C. And now it's to come out of it.
The fairytale ends with the marriage. After that a different kind of time begins, full entry to the tale or living death without a story in it. T's eyes like Sheila's, looking caught in mischief. When you write - Paris was as legendary as Connacht.
For five years she was married to a magician and did not lose herself. What happens with you in marriage I can scarcely remember, it happens in dreamland and I think to firm myself into memory of it. What they called attention was enchantment. You remember better, and with the magician I remembered.
The North Country and my work there eaters of (precious) stones The hero's truck with fairies / have diplomatic immunity And I knew her mind was running on traditions of who changed four of his kisses to birds all wild peoples even now who would pass in sleep into countries of unearthly beauty and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house. that our dreams lose their wisdom when the sap rises In the gentleness of real fuck, the images. with red hair that was bright as silver There was a bridegroom one time very much put out not to be able to have a son. "Give the queen, your wife, a fish to eat." The cook's son and the queen's alike. Heroes are always witty. It is a suit you can put on, and you will see everyone but no one can see you. The sword nothing can stand against. The shoes that go faster than the wind. And they began striking stones around, and men came from them. turned him to a green stone Folk art "the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generation." What's the folk art of my country - none. What do I know about this marriage. Are the two satisfied and their omens agreed. It isn't for passion but as accomplishment. At last I have got that marrying done. After that they were no longer one mind but slowly became themselves, contracted and confident. In here is the sense of a life having epochs and one being the search for the mate. The companion was last year. This year mate. Next year work. (And Luke?) Now I find out what mate is. And find the deep fright of the rival and what I'd do is - refuse to fight. It seems a contrary possibility, that if it isn't the mate it's the guru. Or is marrying itself a teacher. The fruit of it, in both. A temptation to happy marriage. Is it sleep? J's definition (if not living together) "It seemed to be coming up a lot lately so we just decided to name it." Marilyn [Cox] "I'd been happily married for twelve years and I was bored."
Is there a way to find out. No it's to see the crossroads and know which path is taken. In the stone, work: I imagine it and don't do it, and that is a way of traveling among ideas of works, which is conceptual art. Multitude of distractions, concentrate. Assumptions about being (morality) Questions: T and C the assassins, the mate. Choosing is our way, not-choosing is their way. J talks about not jumping cultures. What would that mean for me. To keep going back to the original. DJ says forget it. Studying / transcending work / to sharpen / every day. After it was done we were stunned, imperceptible. Halt to the being's flow, it was an operation on a time. - Opened the door. Night over the sill, beautiful night. shaking about them their living hair which moves with the motion of their thoughts, now spreading out and now gathering close to their heads. In my dream Jam was naked in my family stalking out of the tub. I had said to Judy that I was something like committed, Mother warned me not to tell Father. When he saw her next to his desk naked he tried to find an elegant circuitous way to tell her it wasn't done - made a little speech about his daughter. (I can't remember.) She turned it. The taboo between us that means I can't play with his wit, or theirs. Recover wit (as with Paul). Paralysis. That's social talk. Supported by the lover's love, went to the evil ones and could be immune - fearless to say what she was. That her mother had died from her, and if you have a mind yet to join with herself, she is willing to keep her word to you. Such a pleasant comrade, so full of songs and every kind of trick and fun. She read Yeats to be with me, and was shy to tell me. She told someone. And although it was night-time outside, it was daylight he found within. for there are many go wandering and forgetting like that, when once they have been given the touch. They are spicy. Is she foolish (as I am). Is not that Hanrahan that had the school, and that was brought away by Them? They would all know what dancing was like when they saw Hanrahan dance. She would listen for a minute to hear what the poet was saying to her child. She threw them on the hearth, and the flame rose up and showed her to be very comely and smiling. The house is narrow but the world is wide and there is no true lover that need be afraid of night or morning or sun or stars or shadows of evening, or any earthly thing. There is many a one I have saved from it with the power that is in my songs, as it was in the songs of the poets that were before me from the beginning of the world. The children ran out then, full of pride and of mischief, calling out the song as they ran. of those that can neither sin nor obey Because it was not only the blossom of youth they were looking for in one another, but the beauty that is as lasting as the night and the stars. Their faces were full of tenderness for all their proud looks. They also were lovers, that had heartshaped mirrors instead of hearts, and that they were looking and ever looking on their own faces in one another's mirrors ... are not put in songs by the poets because they sought only to triumph over one another, and so to prove their strength and beauty, and out of this they made a kind of love. The Others, the great Sidhe, had stolen her wits one Samhain night many years ago, when she had fallen asleep on the edge of a rath. Hanrahan. In a dream with you. Hanrahan lay there through the length of the day, in his pains and his weakness, and when the shadows of evening were falling he heard her voice again coming up the hillside. Being called toward the legendary. and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences Yeats' device of personae. "I experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, indissoluable, a mirror." In writing, or movies, the movement through states, and in that trying to see how to live. All of what's here and my desire to work hard in it, memory has to stay while the states complexify, that's it.
The superstition we build in ourselves recognizing that we can 'choose' our messages in different ways. and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know Writing the passage into drugs and out through. Marriage. Unfulfilled passions become visions. If we become interested in ourselves, in our own lives, we pass out of the vision. forgetful of our own names and actions and yet in perfect possession of ourselves The exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem, of all the moments of my life, the happiest and the wisest. This study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea. certain aims and governing loves, the fire that makes all simple But in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. He had once quoted me Goethe's phrase, in Cocteau's version: I love you, is that any business of yours? Roy on the telephone, he starts out saying he loves me, that irritates me, he wants to talk about my film. He's so transparent, he brings up sentimental pictures, he has little speculations, little rags he uses as self-praise. I mistakenly become sincere because I want Luke to come back, and betray it, and then am lost in a begging tone. He wants to know if I'm planning revenge. I want to convince him I'm not. Jill and Sean think he should be with Catherine. Sara is there all the time. Is Roy really the vacancy he sends, I know sometimes he can be appealed to. I am a gaping distress of the belly. He pitches me into such nonsense and it's the sense of being connected for life to such a demon. (No one will not be selfish.) because in the body the sensitive presence of the soul I scold him for his fabulous tags, quoting this and that, say why does he keep giving me that. "It's all I've got, Ellie," in a charming voice that I like. - I have a panic sensation of regression, chaos, my brain decomposing, the fitful energy of this intelligence, the waste of it on incomprehension of my friends' lives and my own. An upheaval from under the confident development of its own knowledge and pleasure. The ease of Eton St with Luke and the big house and Paul's flattering support, a life to be made inside feminism and spirituality, art untried but possible, the lovely woman in an easy prettiness holding power, moving in the house with intimations of power in happiness, power of expansion in the co-op, new friends, inner untouched. She was so young. I think of myself these days as living in another order suspended over a void fear of loss of myself. Times confused, knowing more and believing less, that means with questions that don't make answers. And suspended over the void of what we call marriage in which we try not to lie about mythology and its depth in us, and are in terror of selling another more evolved part of ourselves for it. Sometimes when I lie with this woman I grow warm and real in the simplicity of offering myself and trusting what is offered, and yet I am afraid that my thoughts may lead me to mistrust what I need so much. I travel between a marveling penetration and a dimness that sees only that this and that are not right. This old-fashioned language of de Beauvoir. It is that I need to relearn to think. My friend leading me in her brown voice to imagine that riddles can be solved. The earnest detective with such a lovely sense and firmness in her way. Her beauty I needn't envy. This beauty next to me, that isn't for itself or for me, gratuitous, there when we have time to please ourselves in it. Offering myself and mistrusting: what I mistrust is that we want to complete ourselves and get on with it, we want to use each other and aren't testing as if our lives depended on it. And maybe we aren't so young that we don't know that our lives are on their own. You're here, I don't speak to myself anymore, I want there to be no separation and it isn't privacy I need. But there's such an amount of garbage in your life and mine, the detail we see, oh waking with you and telling the story of what the waking was. We repeat ourselves only recently / and forgive probably. Am I more interested in the trust than in her and again I see that it's alright. The nameless whose voice grows inside mine. The small pop-eyed person, narrow, and out of her comes such a large voice. The possessed lecturer / the intimate head / who isn't afraid / oh she wasn't afraid / to make herself absurd. I'm afraid to praise you in this way because I might turn you into someone I'd be afraid of and yet the inwardness with you dazes me, I'm not used to it, and in trust. There, if I described and rhapsodized you would I feel myself firming around that act of separating inner and outer. It isn't to return to old ways but to make myself in the new. And to act inside the terms of the new, in some way I have to invent. And the first is this extraordinary act of trust in ourselves beyond ourselves telling us that we are married will marry must invent the acts of marriage obedience and around that trust and marvel or accepting some notion of will in the language / should In obedience there's such a lovely life. But fragmentary, so terrifyingly unmade. Like Roy in his half cunning senility not saying what he means and drifting in philosophical junk, lost in what he doesn't know, jealousy, envy, murder, pity, The purpose of most religious teaching, the insistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is to make certain of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous. When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic, and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only rarely and with difficulty speak their own thoughts and memory, mistake our memory for their own and believe themselves whom and what we please. Yeats 1917 Per amica silentia lunae - Dreamed, after this, hiking, coming over a mountain to a wide view. It was not quite myself, or the self I've ever been in dreams. I was an au pair, a new baby and an older one, to a woman who was rich, a busy business woman with firm flesh, tall, made up. She and her business colleagues ate expensive lunches, a country house with a long lane. I complained, but not feeling, about being on duty all day and evening. The valley. It was up the valley, was as if unknown. A lake. Rock walls holding the mountain off some hoses. Houses along a roadside, farmhouses. - When I left him at the beginning of August I knew that he would never go out of my life again. - You, Trudy - there's something we don't manage to understand and it's a frustration to me the way that when I'm in your company I'm polarized into an absence that is refusal and mistrust. You aren't candid, you don't say what you have. And you seem to think I ought to nonetheless, because I once did. -
To see it without them [more film logistics lists] - Land. I wanted to be the barley field, and next year - it might be oats. Snow in a curve. A wide porch must have been the most pleasant part of the house because all through the songs of Homer it is offered to the honoured guest as sleeping quarters. Pine moss roof When the (pine) needles shed, they accumulated between the pine rafters, gradually forming a sod base from which grew a dense covering of grass. Pine to pine was what the old mountain builders called this process, saying that pine needles would not decay pine logs or boards. Barns were red, absorbed heat - paint made of skim milk and rust. The music of Ephrata had been too unconventional, too strangely original to be accepted by the rest of the world. The voices had been aimed at the low ceiling of the Saal and the listener had had the sensation as if the sound, unlike all known choral singing, had descended from there and had hovered angelesquely. Shakes cured for 2 weeks in pool of salt water. - At Whistler. Woke from dreaming, light - tried to think who the happy dreamer had been, she was lightly connected, emotion didn't hold her. Last night a fury toward Cheryl passed through me, my arms clenched, I wanted to smash her head, shoot the two of them from a distance. An intense wave until I remembered it was information. Then it passed. Squirming in wrongness, grown-up pain, writhing on the pin. Those who want to travel maybe learn to ride on it. Remembering what it's like in the world senses make for young ones. Lay in bed imagining snow falling [right] then [left] then [zigzagged]. While furious with C and thinking to myself about it saw a single drop falling 18" into water and quiet rings opening under it. In the morning there was deep snow and grey lake, snow over yellow leaves, the colors of rushes, silence and ping music when it rained. We were in the canoe setting out gaily, shoveled snow out with the paddle. Sun got into a lower cloud and made a brilliance in a rift. The joy that sprang into me when I thought of being a barley field / and when I researched architecting a house to a place / and imagined making something with you / and imagined being useful in that way I wanted so long. "You need a big garden." And you need a dreamer such as me. The city is no less interesting because it is not where we think it is. - Phosphenes neurons in the structure of the eye The will of the eye, the will = desire. Brain as induction coil Huichols weave their peyote visions or vice versa described themselves as having become part of the scene. This point marked the transition from pseudohallucination to true hallucination. Religious pictures / small animals and humans 1. gratings, lattice, filigree, honeycomb, checkerboard 2. cobweb 3. alley, tunnel, cone, vessel 4. spiral Crystal gazing, falling asleep, waking up To reverse space - to become receptive shibui - two opposites in precarious balance, eg irregular order
Iron bedstead under a tree, guest bedroom karumi - lightheartedness that overcomes the burden of the past and consciously ignores the shortcomings of the present while doing the unconventional
The lightning rod, with a purple glass ball. A weather vane. A lacework gable. The best way is to make a medicine of the illness. - Reading The secret of the golden flower. Dreamed T coming into bed, we kissed, "Does Cheryl know you're here?" And then Cheryl climbed in smiling slightly. I put my arms around her thin back and my mouth around her flat tongue and had the joy of home. Long night's adventures with them climbing through the window to them. Later I lived in a house where Rhoda was. She came in with a handsome man, I put on a pink dress and fur coat, walked out with a potty, emptied it in the lane. There was a big garden at the back of my building full of dykes making a garden. A broken pumpkin they were planting seeds out of. A clamp with carrots steaming with bright oranges. I was self-conscious and pretending ease in the fur coat and dress and nylons, looked down (taking off my white gloves) and saw I still had blue stretch pants on. The women were all galloping up the field playing ball, the calling that passed by, there were many of them. -
the most true constant lover of his wedlock Scotch marry - by mutual declaration before witnesses to marry together marrer - spoiler marram 1. sea-reed, bent-grass, marram-grass, sea-marram, which binds together the sands on the shore 2. a sandhill grown over with this grass marrow obs. 1440 1. companion, partner, mate 2. a husband or wife 1578 3. one's equal or like, one's match in a contest 4. a thing which makes a pair with another - In kundalini book: a man is no good if he does not know how to relax a woman for intercourse. Respect as aphrodisiac. Reading and thinking do nothing: only real acts. Tantra. Meditation, cult of extreme feeling, art, sex, drugs, magic and social action. The color combination of tantra - maximum force. Gouache and gold on cloth. Wine, hog flesh and sex, using the taboos. The tantrika has to commit herself to acts which destroy prestige and self esteem.
They are not uncertain about the future life, contented, they have nothing more to attain. Do not covet or hoard, free from crookedness or busybodying. Merciful, care nothing for profit or loss, help everyone. Love all creatures, being free of anger. Stay where they want, fear no one, particularly fond of music. They envy no one. Radiant inner vision of the whole.
The whole countryside is scattered with objects in which the divine shows itself in ways and for reasons which local tradition alone can explain. These hallows receive puja even causal offerings. May be a little cluster of red-painted stones in the corner of the field or a big boulder on a hillside, one of whose faces is painted red. Flowers or squeezed handful of rice.
this image to which my heart is fastened with such a love spiral shells - root mantram Om mantra - spell - one syllable - call and condense a certain energy yantra - as spell - in the visible - pattern - condenses It is essenced from a more fully diagrammed. Content and concentration drive each other to a higher pitch. To concentrate an emotive and psychic, and not just in relation to other abstractions Body, groundplan Crystal, diamond Centred on single point Build up over a long period of time the presence of the devata The 4 gates and the enclosure Being in love with a divine lover Ragas - nuances of erotic sentiment Tone-color, rhythm, melodic pattern Forms of art stimulate latent traces in different experience modes - mind tastes them, in sequence. Puts it in special state transcending emotive contents and becoming conscious intellectually and emotionally of itself. Tantric ritual an art, expanded and made by those with an instinct for it. Kali - the power of Time Driving themselves beyond the limits of disgust Eat bits of a corpse, fuck one Red female Siva - the great Weaver of illusory worlds
Calculation systems with checkerboards to work out time positions The yantra of the Planets, which promotes all kinds of peace. If the guardians of the directions and all the planets are worshipped in it, they grant all desires. Plane disks on an axial thread Stream of subtle moving aether passing through envelopes of increasing density to a world sphere Color out of colorless / born Marry is river Jaina diagram of the bands of progressively denser matter projecting from outer space into the Universe Jina as released spirit
I looked across your hair
window into the ground well, a pool, room, a path
away in the old worlds make paradise gently as you know how
Story of Lillian Alman, a Russian, a maid, in New York. "I go Siberia." [story found in a clippings file in the Vancouver library central branch] Spring of 1927. 30 miles a day, ate roots, leaves and berries. Got to Telegraph cabins, arrested for vagrancy but had $20 and under her skirt a thin iron bar 18" long. "It's a protection against men." Fined her $25 and costs for possession of an offensive weapon. Okalla Prison for two months. In Vancouver, overwintered as kitchen help, saved money. Spring 1928 on the road again, at the Telegraph cabins in a skirt, two men re-outfitted her with their two best shirts, stout breeches, new handkerchief, boots. Lent a dog, who died. A man drowned going to help her. The telegraph men took her in. At Dawson overwintered, living alone and confiding in no one. Waitress. Got a skiff and repaired it. 1929 spring got onto the Yukon River and went 1600 miles down to the Bering Sea. On the coast of the Bering Sea left her boat on a beach and walked across the Arctic. "I tried to make friends at first but everybody wanted no part of me, as a foreigner, and that so deeply hurt me I couldn't bear it and so I began to walk." 1930 a woman arrived with 3 Eskimos in dress of the Diomede Islands in the Straits, at Provideniya, Siberia.
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