| dames rocket 8 part 4 - january - february 1978 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Suppose, Socrates says, we were being listened to by a man of generous and humane character, who loved or had once loved another such as himself. [Plato Phaedrus] no, to write looking at the thing, and in this one, the you / you/ sliding downstairs outcries 'portentous' I was at her profile telling myself to remember how it looked I talk to her as if writing somewhere else: if I don't remember this face it means you aren't real there's the face and I don't know it I don't know you but speak to you hesitatingly sometimes swift when I put on the orange cap and you laugh outright, I know you you told the way odysseus unrecognized in his bloody rags raged to know where was his bed, built into a live olive I was suspicious, you seemed to be entertaining me with a charming tale
'are you a witch?' blue light from the (power) burner I was mad at you because you couldn't keep me in my body, I was such a distance and thinking all the while dreamed a horizontal ride on a bicycle, didn't know if you could stop but we're stopped by a pedestrian there was another bicycle behind me and I assumed it was you but it was habiba I asked if you'd watch out for me if I go underground and make sure I come back I dreamed a street with a weathered house built suspended on shaky pilings, most of it seemed unsupported but I went in and up the stairs and it held, dark, although daylight outside I walked cautiously it was a small house with pyramid roof when I came down the stairs the door on the right had a light under it a man came out of it, who lived there, spoke to me I was surprised someone dared inhabit
c, t and I at c's table with dope pernod coffee apples (like m noting the potions to make us same) t got excited telling o'keefe and steichen t's presence gives us intuitions of beings c a possibility of abstraction then t went to her drawings and I could look at c's brightness we talked about recognitions "they don't last very long" "a split second" laugh "they're not emotion" "emotion is after, when you realize what's happened" "it's the same as with a good joke" c's yugoslavian boy he took her to a room where all the men slept in one bed and all the women in the other she got in with the women and one of them put an arm around her she said she liked it t said she slept 3 nights in a strange country c said of j and myself that j seems a friend, a stream distinguishing it from eruption and trouble I said that it's interesting, she's a stream exactly but it's on the edge of being the other that our knowing each other is very unstable I liked to tell her about us, my sentences in her presence seemed clear like wire she wouldn't talk about t because it's sacred and talking about it would give it to someone else were you sleeping? j what she means is trudy would kill her j's body was there round brown sleek, the shape of the back of the waist when I can't materialize it in my arms does it mean she's not in it c and I telling our pleasure of lewis's stories, the glass water wall and reepicheep goes over what she's reading zo CS Lewis 1952 The voyage of the Dawn Treader daphne on the telephone says she's reading two books in which women see out of the common world and go mad she said she's angry with them I said it's wrong because what has to happen is that she comes back and makes a new order in which social and private are differently made we are intoxicated together also talk about structure in writing, writing being erotic, science fiction she said she's excited when I think about thinking I tell her how I always did it and didn't know, and then began to and felt it was my right home talked about the flash/clap images out of somewhere else she said she had an instant of another time talking to her I had a sensation of eternity (the soul is immortal because everything that changes is immortal) but couldn't tell her, it wd have sent us into another order, we were still in the safe one ezra up the steps I say I'm glad to see you to the person still coming up out of darkness in the stairs I'm excited joke press in warm luxury she says when we're happy in that way we lie on the floor tell daphne, and the joke she says she won't read her poems because she isn't happy with them she wants one detail from last night and I tell it "stream" the sense of eternity, which she had in summer and in hong kong when she talks about SFU I can't want to stay with it because I'm pulled toward my thoughts and the pleasure of telling them to her she started to tell me one of her excitements, about the old people turned into trees, but we didn't make it immediate enough I feel guilty then about not listening I begin to hear my voice go childish and still don't know what it indicates c on the telephone you don't know what you have, what does trust mean to you silence I don't think I know that one I don't think so either and I don't think you should learn it, you have such a wildness oh but you tempt me! gallantry daphne said she had a fever and after couldn't concentrate for a while when we were in bed there was a heat at our bellies she called desert and it was sunlike she says she knows about the orgasms up from the feet, when she's tired she says, her body and eyes assert themselves she saw a dark green round tip coming out of the desert ground I asked her to make it move a little josie said she dreamed an arch made of paper she built for me to sit under during my reading at the coffeehouse the eye lovers r and diana, the corner grocery people and that intimacy the stories about it that spring into all of us, talking about when we run out scared of the work the unconsciousness of picture taking d says marion's pictures, she's very aware of her light sources castenada and zane grey talking jude into reading castenada, contemplating the euphoria telling the art gallery and the art administrators and the artists talking the robot the individual zonks of eyes (r says how much she enjoys it) with r I let go a ton of excitements the relief of someone to talk to about what it was like actually focuses why didn't I say that I'd told rhoda the lumps, in spite of myself, because she was brave to lead me to it with questions j on phone, I push about the thesis, she's complaining it's hard - have a waking, simple waking and then ezra scratching and she in my bed in her little exquisite - and a definiteness of her body and I dreamed the big train I was to catch, to sweden(borg) - and woke in a flux of near and far, tony, the sufis - we thought we were far but were near at mozart breakfast the prurience of families 'knowing', her questions about finding out she's afraid she'll love rhoda library a trance of excitement reading yeats on swedenborg and feeling the next life the chimney corner, a rest and she had it suddenly gathered in her, love, so we could and the awe of touching freely such a delicate loveliness oh I must, can, act as if I'm allowed and it's true, the park became supper and home and then wrestling my conscience about roy and the letter and calling back to make the right decision and having made it hearing it confirmed in his voice but and t and c c saying when she gets to the edge of what she knows how to do there's an awe I went on about my sense of marveling frightened dissolution t said I had good intuition c that when she gets into philosophy she resolves everything into paradox and is in one arm of it at various times watching the language come out, jokes nellie said she's caught in a relationship and wants to get out, but she needs that closeness she said her friend caroline has decided she wants a spiritual path after five years thinking about it, she's glowing - I think myself ill with black eyes and lumps under, dry mouth, phlegm, fear, sleep j hardly exists in me she is so plasmic the night her body became solid and we made love in the same world the contempt in sandy's instantaneous face when I'd blundered in with the table / I imagine a war having been won in a second lynn [hughes] she was making breast-high pots, black, towers, slabs like pointing signs, she's gone from masks to these someone said they were animals standing in the dark, and she liked that we were talking about beds and finding people in each others' and I had fear in my stomach; you confessed you feel I'm paying for our intimacy with illness diana had company j dialed accidentally the number of her old house we were silly about seeing who was visiting diana when I knocked on the door we were all shocked it energized us to work and sandy to spend hours with d on the phone this another heavy night she'd said disloyally that maybe sandy wasn't so smart after all, because she never took on the thesis as serious work your love in that world true and false we are trying to work out riddles we're trying to get behind our scenes your classes women who said what they weren't interested in you're interested in the intelligences, what they want usually you've liked to tell sandy all about it "they knew what I was up to, playing for time" you want to talk about turning into a man you had a few tears when I said death had come into my life at the same time as it came into yours you brave out your frights to see what will come of them often I don't understand you I love sleeping with my head next to you trudy phoned while I was scared, oddly, not knowing to let me be the strength of books you were mad at me because of how I turned you out in sandy's presence someone you thought came into your night and you were paralyzed wanting to surprise me, thought you heard the heavy coat fall you were scared it was sandy "sandy said someday we'll both want the same person and then we'll see" heather, "an intimacy I was excluded from" a mystery do you think that, the intimacy we have when we're on, sandy could improve on? "my answer is that I don't want to answer that" talking about jealousy I said it was when you imagined other people more intimate, and that you aren't jealous if you think they've made a mistake going with them rather than you; you said you were jealous if you thought the other had made a mistake but couldn't do anything about it "I was singing when she was there" "she hears things even if she's occupied somewhere else" I want you to help me speed up, I feel myself laborious do you 'protect' me singing in the bathroom, combing your hair your storytelling, it has something to do with a secret our earnestness together I love it when you laugh! animation when she talked about competing with percy, making a million suavity of companion enemy floyd [farnsworth], rudy [epp] and liz [gray]. [my youngest brother, his girlfriend and a younger brother of a classmate in la glace school] I played important and talked too much to see well, but drew out rudy talking about community politics, his tale of the house with the beautiful dirty interior, a bachelor lives in. floyd liking to make useful things out of useless things, he talked about mathematics, how you take an element and enlarge it out by logic. we talked about understanding what we're about, and where is the beginning. I stepped on r when he was like father, the contemptuous ukrainian joke, said he had a cheap high. we agreed men were stupider because they have to bluff. floyd's fine sense of people. you are a part of them and you are trying not to be, he said. j telephoning while there's a strong wind making clear brilliance over the mountain, she says tell me a story and I say what's wrong, do you want me to come? and go, with a taxi driver who also likes the wind she's sleepy and breathing fast and loud, she thought she heard one of her spooks I watched my visions and rode inside on them wanting to know who/what her ghost is he'd be decomposed by now early sunday was our name for it when we woke, a clear green over the mountains, clear air and a joy of light inside lovemaking the gods instructed our touch and we slipped into persia, a couch with birds singing outside a wood partitioned window I was thinking of the kinds of light in the ink paintings, morning, clear afterwards we talked to check whether we'd been there together oh jami! we were awake in a dream, the airport sky with every kind of cloud, the colors do eyes like certain things for themselves, she asked the wet fields our boots sinking past the grass cowpaths, rail fences, a wet ferny (boston) bush I peed, while she stopped and kept talking to me it got dark I was entranced among the depths of different branches. the moon had got so intense we were drunk (she in driving) made a prairie by lighting horizontal clouds far away looked through the window saw the old people at the small table in their clean house, they had to tell us their epics first, and then they began to love us, grandma's story (her mouth quaking) of the so poor lady in the next bed, who cried night and day, then one night the crying stopped a man came and closed all the curtains round and they took her away (she waved her hand sideways) she had a view of a room with small children, saw them fed, played with they didn't cry or fight I asked whether, when they go to heaven, they'll ask helen questions, and will she ask them grandpa so beautiful in his usefulness, "now I'm the boss" "and I don't care," she said the photographs of peter's mother and father, their silver wedding luise had presence and so did the school master's wife the rows of clods mother's bright face, she's in her father's arms mary in diptheria, papa ich hab' dich lieb, choking the iodine glycerine swab prescribed by the veterinarian to open mary's throat, peter used it on himself when he had smallpox "and it came open" how much sweeter he is than when he was a young bossman father grandma asking how far apart we live "three or four miles" "not so far," quickly passes the candy box our happiness got way into them and theirs into us on the strength of our attention they have their memory my old job, reminding, now my friend is there on the way home we've seen enough and ruminate objects give and take one way to exist is to understand the oneiric/body/all in the draw and spell of objects people are beings who can have the same objects in, another mirror (mirrors on posts set in gatherings) - t being scared of her painting and her, being brave and saying one thing and then seeing more and having you reply to what I see, then I see other parts clearer (coming home, dali) a love in the light, it was there brilliant black all evening, we talked about night you are writing a journal instead of talking (roy's here) wonder if daphne's beauty is for (from) you talked about rudy's aggression, father and the draw I have to his breaking point she went into a tunnel with her brother she looked pretty talking about roy? showed dylan open talked about fear of death always being there, "that was the revelation in acid, for me" she dreamed she embraced me and I left my body in her arms, she said hey because it had begun to sag we patronized each other equally she said she wouldn't have wanted to know me in the way she did, implying she'd have liked to really do it, and I am so far from imagining it, she's pinched and absented I have a lot of time to watch her I was studious she said she doesn't study, she does but I have the word, I was worried jam is making me a student wrongly (willfully) the dream about seattle, being in a strange town looking for food? tickets for a flight, more expensive bought at the bar than at the travel office, when I'm at the airport I go out noticing the seams of my black stockings are outside. my six-tired car has 6 flats and a heavy truck on the back of it, I'll have to drive it home, unlicensed and scared earlier a house where I was staying, a woman of a certain nationality? daphne zócalo, author inscribed her held story and mine, when we both told them, I still had heaviness but before we told them it was like a pulse the way I am with j comes into it, working - telling the parts of the stories we haven't told, joan asking if I hurt under my arm she said before christmas she had a pain in her (left?) showed right breast, cysts the acupuncturist did her - her story of paul bowles' book, she dreamed the end of it differently, the woman ate bedouin food and wore bedouin clothes and became a bedouin woman in the sensuality of being with the women, but when she saw a white man she was recalled to her memory and went back to the 'world' Paul Bowles 1949 The sheltering sky Doubleday diane daphne's healer sufi friend I ching rest, repose, illness presaged, but with recovery cancer has to do with loss of will to live is she doing anything about it herself she should continue has to discover what it is, and it will further her path then a wave of doubt about all of it daphne's phrase in sleep this afternoon: she is in the hospital chasing demons out of trees tang [the acupuncturist says] trachea, lungs, heart all have to do with nervous circulation in the right note the heal journeys first white gate path tree at climb rest bird diagonal hawk? owl eyes, snuggle (telephone) black bird crow beak grows no? yes beak strikes wings strike I open my arms on the left it struggles with the node, a grit pulls as worm, it has a long white membrane root not easy to get out still tugging second above gate flying it body seeping in air falling upward look at her/me head to the side plaid shirt I lay myself on (weightless) and embrace, head on her shoulder, feel her back third flying lower see path an abyss this time tree falls into it I ride the tree ready to fall it levels out into sky I sit on branch lifted sail lie on it on water it's turning I'm willing under water and I will to see but it's on its way up and shoots out to a toyland green a toy barn stops at a shabby yellow house two windows and a porch it's the acupuncturist's in the country I think to ask him what's wrong he says you have cancer and you're going to die a hot flash of fear in the stomach, I lose passivity and try to manage it, say, yes I'll do it in this land lay on his couch and tried to do it then to avert it in this world the child dream of falling headfirst into land field and that was dying easy and good I felt myself go the journeys aren't allowing conclusions to be passive or unmistakable j wondered if she's killing me, was scared the day I saw tang day she lectured, tired we had a nervous night I buzzed in my body and thought about a list poem, one rectangle room white tree (sapling - I saw it) octave got up to write it (she went to bed earlier) in the morning she got up and ate breakfast alone and went for sheila when she came back with sheila she was the frog professor and I was moving away crossly from her hands because (I misnamed it as possession) she was childish then I scolded her for not helping me with writing and she went home dreamed I had been in a living room (3rd) while she spoke intently on the phone I was jealous she couldn't remember who she came after me esther plaintively what about me? next dream she was looking after two little babies, put one (dark) into the lower bunk and the other, fair, ill, into the top, a water-bed with 6 blue cube water pillows, the baby, to be able to breathe, had to be put with nose under water muss phoned to ask about the milk she knew how to make (by-product of her real work) oedipus and tapas and we didn't like it and I went home alone, found her at the telephone looking up her number she worried me by saying my work is like making a dictionary of my own and on from that how she doesn't like herself teaching and then we sat on the floor in the hall and liked each other until sheila summoned we fell into conversation no we climbed oooooooo foghorn hyacinth blue bed cover cool air radio squawking these days I play piano long times sleep a lot eat many peeled apples drink a lot of milk and am not terrified the moon pictures in nat g are food the fern coming down from up there has little sheaths on its new whip, iris strong scent new in the garden bare small derrida at stella's j's willingness, an operator, makes me ughk the dinner after the marsh, fences, space, moat, she threw up and stell got indigestion and ting had grouchy backache she got through when she's froggy I feel wasted there was sun in the garden, mrs choy took magnifying glass to the broken marble to see galaxies in, water poured over it made wet earth smell, out in the country, no arrival, stell and her animals second sunday of that road oh brilliant loving luke - evening in journals I find dreams of white bulls writing, try to get to it and don't, except for piano a blear day dream I'm face to my father he says tenderly I'm worried about you, you look so pale we're speaking with a white string between our mouths he advises me to be alert, notice the healing currents in nature (I see the farm), not to use the direct herbs but the subtle ones. I wake and tell myself to remember we have a tender conversation about why he didn't really learn to play the piano baby judy hits us with little fists, shrieks, jealous j phones saying she shd massage me every day she had a realization about a simple life, the fisherman game with sheila, was thankful I had revealed it to her, shouting thankyou at/into the attic on the phone it was unbearable yes, bye went to smoke and separated into a contemplation of my ghostly systems, the voice structures speaking against each other, and resisted you and watched your seduction said I had to go away traveling soon because I'm scared of how fast we are making selves she says she isn't scared saw the windows become a screen for lovely shadows streaming across briefly the world existed she told me I was flirting with the idea of cancer and must go and find out I am realizing how my debts are crowding me and I let them hypnotize me into faraway she said if she were an artist she would be a flashy one and if it were religion she wouldn't mix art into it and that being a professor is too slow for her, wd like to try business the powerful hypnotism of her mother, we found the lump the night she threw me away so her mother wouldn't see, there is that covered and glossed, and the bitter fight at the end of the hong kong visit, was about her mother how did she feel when I was drunk at the dinner she said, if you resist, you aren't really traveling I said, I resist because I'm trying to be alone she told me the different materials, stone, cotton, fur of my body and I had her briefly as a balinese thin-armed fruit-body but most of the time I was trying to travel to alone in the stone she said something about my writing being able to hold an idea? - found myself resolved to pay debts today willing to exist in this world once again - thank you - when I went to doctor lynne she said I could put away my death trip cheryl patiently got me out of silence I was hesitantly speaking her language the snow the xeroxes and the library archeological images and then daphne come to telling me, I missed it at least once, that she wants to tell me about her friend (are you worried about one of your friends?) she is cutting and pasting 'all these lovely transcripts' Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter 1979 Opening doors: Vancouver's east end Province of British Columbia Aural History Program t said anamnesis, the memory of former lives "isn't it a beautiful word" c taking courage to speak about her photographs, her humor worlds so startling one of windows on doors latched "yes, you can see how it opens" the very cerebral ones I can't read the inspired knock/knock knock all afternoon I looked at her shape, get silenced by the lightness of it colette's world of balance love/distance/pleasure white light in the rooms, snow describe but that's energy cocteau the last pages of enfants knocking me into the outerspace/inner where fright colette's outer this world and the other one story of holding them one past daphne
last night's farm rain on my tent, I put a bench in front of it the sky was black but full of lights from below, the place where the creek curves round in kinderwater's had as if spotlights wonderful intensity and I had that sense of relieved letting myself into world ah - in the house andy / his friend and double (chris day) in the bedroom 2 babies his had grapes on her naked little body she was eating them I sang a welsh song with the friend he held the notes long after I stopped in the night world joann-edith was visiting, burning leather scrolls for artwork a hospital skating rink, judy a sequined moth landed on my head and spoke to me, I was careful in school I was in a place in the mountains running down and then up, a man from the university saw me his seat was in a tree, I had come once before (in a dream) to bring him papers reading the elliad (odyssey) 6 february sunday looking at her (except when we were with the whales) I was baffled, at night I try to get away from her, at the distance where I am I can't tell if I'm dazzled by suspension in metaphysics or if she is distracting me stoned I watched her leading me on trails away from my frightened thought and in bed her difference, small head white face young thing and goddess I was in simplicity of confusion she was/is unscrupulous setting up a screen she has her desire and I don't have mine my death was her invention as much as mine and then she stopped me in it "tell me a story" I told white wolf in a white country, eyes shining in the long night, came to sea during the one hour of dawn, stepped on a floe traveled down coast to land met a seal? that spoke to it in its own way then a white owl also spoke and finally (I was getting bolder, she was asleep) in a tragic rhythm, killed a man? whose daughter's name was white wolf there was a woman arriving at the erotic art show as I crossed toward she (was it he?) tall, white clogs, fur and black hat - my own rain hat is the orange baseball cap laundromat gave - upstairs when I caressed the small bronze back I turned to see her eyes, below, turning away hesitating on the corner her face went by on the bus I didn't hurry but it was the bus I was going to take to the library my head was alarmed and she had her hat off, and those private big eyes, and she wasn't more afraid than I of the long look the muddy creek, a place less shallow, I wanted it for a pool, thought to clear it; a garden and things growing although it's early, maybe the garden from very early, higher on the slope, digging wanting to restructure it; up the hill a girl disappearing into a church, a young man who must have been a preacher; burger maple come for his wrench he lent me in another dream; a dutch reform novel that went from early times to the present, and a girl who lost the man she wanted because another woman would be better for the child, view down sumacs, red stalks from very high up when c and t were here, I knew I was an embattled absence and wanted to be alone but thought maybe they'll find me, I felt myself without origination, stupid, rough false and getting violent, and their two contained t looked funny, little white rubber face, c looked wonderful and began laughing at everything (she said because of valerian and being able to breathe) she said I come on to her and she wants to be free, they are still stuck and she was trying to enroll me and I did have a thrill looking at her I admit it! I shouted it was purely flab and protest it is unresolved, c said my place in her life was enigmatic t said you'll just have to learn to enjoy it you'll get everything you want c was drawing me about my refusal of everything I do, said if it's big enough it could be very high and I shout that I can't find my judgment 15 feb the time I didn't note had a sunday we went out along the river at fort langley, field with blond grass car buried in stones the sky pink and fading a countryside and a dump we came home and lay in bed fought about lovemaking and then went into it deep and real and together sleeping she said help and that she loved me (reverie of victorian valentines) (hers was landscape) slept unquietly I had to wake to work at the library, tired - next day worked on putting together the dark xeroxes, all day, intense concentration at the library, came home couldn't talk to nellie or to jam who was opaque and jowly and said she was mad at me, afraid she would not keep up, went home and I went back to briefing for a descent, which is so familiar I've rewritten parts of it Doris Lessing 1971 Briefing for a descent into hell Vintage saturday I went to see paul [in north vancouver], washed his windows, liked his house, he was bounding on me like a puppy and I liked him but was tired in the evening, went to j's and we went to eat at muckamuck, we argued at the bus stop about what she needs to work out with sandy friday j here on the way to buy anna fish, I slept on the kitchen table, hastings in sun, I decide not to go to edmonton j is vague and her senses don't seem to be working, she isn't noticing things anna's party, I talk to sandy about england, she is calm and kindly with dan and his wife, she and j flare at each other and are indecisive, j is urbane at the house, anna is getting sympathy from everyone, sandy doesn't know how to go home so I go with her on the dark bus, she's very vague and I feel superior and resist feeling anything else sandy phones j and fights about things she heard jam say to me, etc I dislike the jabbering colleagues and don't speak but find myself goodlooking - thursday sun, I am unable to get to anything, eat acid, prepare it first by cleaning house and clearing the kitchen, am cushioned on my being free to watch the beautiful clouds piled up north over the mountains, and south blue gold moving lying in the bathtub in beauty, feeling sad for my companions, imagining going to don to see how he's doing, tell him my fear of jamila and art career life closing too narrow horowitz on the radio telling how it is to be a good pianist, j comes (I haven't seen her since sunday) and looks to me like the troubled child pointed toed a prig a doubt a round belly she seems completely frightened, brings books and lime jello, when she comes back I am playing she can't tell I'm on acid, I tell her I'm sad about vocation and my early companions - in the acid I've felt their existence, wondering if they're going under don, olivia, frank, roy (I cry about roy) wonder about t and c, like to think of rhoda, wonder if I'm going under weds roy kiyooka, we have sympathetic moments but I'm surly about art, he is and isn't there, when he leaves it is on some mistrust, he goes unreal and I hold him off he wanted to talk about t, c and r he admires them the person stands more revealed he said m-w-th resistance, reading odyssey, enthralled feel I am only saying no to everything far from jam now feb 15 smoked to pay attention to the black pictures, saw detail of which are something and which are not (judgment) thought about lessing - the strange construction briefing is, then read a little about gnosticism and noticed how she's like them the beauty of the house springs' sense of reprieve from winter's terror and sickness, maybe to rest and work, wanted to work a bright strong body, not confused, deal with luke's future with me noticed my eyes aren't good (since the acid?) and don't make an uninterrupted space j says she's afraid of me, has badly lost herself I talk about our lovemaking, she says she keeps thinking of what I said about the danger of it. dreamed ralph lecturing with a bank of seals in glass cases - she said she's dazed, unwell, unsure of herself she's just gone on tapezol again, said she's forgetful, was impatient with her students 16 woke at noon, diana told me I hurt her with my indifference, she speaks politely and I don't reply, that she feels judged but needs to use that form in speaking, at first - I say I can't stand polite speech, she tries to run away and I keep taking her back to her grievance, I don't feel I've been unjust or inexact with her, only unconventional. when she goes I wonder whether she's like daphne - they tell me I have power with them, while not engaging with me as accurately as they could j wants to be away from me and says she lost herself very badly somewhere, I was wanting to please her on the phone and reminded her that last week I wanted to be away from her I can't tell how either of them 'are really experiencing me' then I smoke and go out and notice the strange unphysical presence I have in the bank, the teller seems to be difficult with me, it is as if I am not as efficient or direct and so evoke from them a false presence that I then find ugly, I'm thinking about that mirror phenomenon at trudy's I find trudy beautiful to look at, we are gradually loving and happy, I have to work hard at first, cheryl comes and I like her too and love to look at her but from the beginning we have a difficulty that I describe as her being mad at me, she says she isn't but it seems her quarrel with me from last time is still there I feel I could have said yes I'm not with you as much as I was, and I miss you too but when I was hungry you denied me and I told you I'd have to go away from you and I have gone away from you but at this moment I'm here and like to be with you and it's alright and what did/do you expect and this quarrel is from old time and has never been real, it hasn't been named right, ever we talked about roy's journey but I am not so interested in it as you both are t talks about zócalo and submerging in it c and I talk about lessing and how we've watched her t is excited about a woman on television who talked about death and was full of love I see the ghost of a door closing when t and c and I are talking about sleeping a lot and how it makes us feel we must be sick t sez that's how you work on something you don't know you're working on she sez she's been interested in shadows I say I have too and talk about influence and the time I drew those windows. she says she felt I took her away - I say I've also felt that about them c tries to tell me that she's seeing me as mortal and never did before. that's hard to imagine. she says nothing is special and everything gets betrayed t says I'm heavier, or bigger I enjoy telling them how patching my pants got me started on working on the xerox I am lonely with j, in my work and is that because of how much I am with t and c in it but it's from both of us t's painting's of voluptuous carbon black lighted spaces, it's collage but so developed and strange especially the new one, the strange flesh-geometrical beings, she's moving so fast and inventively on the airbrush. there's something of dali but mutated into something I think is completely new, there's something oneiric like in my xeroxes but it isn't a look like dreaming - except lately many of my dreams have been dark being interested in shadows we got enthusiastic about night and its differentness I talked about sensing a decoy in roy and wondered whether cheryl sees her friends going under. she won't answer and it turns into whether she thinks I've gone under and I wanted to know something else when I left and was waiting for the taxi I had trudy's expression and posture and was wondering whether I'd left myself and if so I was jealous of how far she had gone into her invention and felt my own tentative and beginning she said 'you haven't got your full particularity yet and when you do you'll be interested in the particularity of your connection with everyone you know" I agreed and liked that she knew that and am trusting myself with both of them more than I have, I think. when I am with them I am deflected from myself and yet I am interested and like the way my days interest me when I can tell them to them the last sunday night j and I both confessed we found - we wondered if the other was finding us boring. we cried a few tears each, then we made love very close to the white bones in black (what does it mean to make love close to death - yes, something about that - but why scared?) then she fell asleep and suddenly cried out help and she was such a small face asking me to look after her and I loved that as if I'd been needing it, and felt grown up in relation to her for once, she doesn't come in simplicity often - she had been dreaming she was telling me she loved me she'd opened her eyes and looked for me and come close with her head, then she'd found herself unable to speak (to stop herself) the last wrote itself. I was going to say 'to tell me' and in that paralysis had seen keder's dead face. what's going on lovely jamila, the dreams I had telling me it's sandy you're with but the way I don't have a clear sense of how or why you are, is it to do with her grief at your absence, and anna, your circuit, is there something in its existence that you don't want to share and feel somewhere disloyal about and what's disloyalty and I don't feel you have been but there's something why was sandy like that at the party does she feel confused because she thinks it's still you she's with and if you are why can't I imagine it keder is the password for a part of you I don't reach into, some way I don't know you and you're lonely in. I can't imagine you in your sense of that death, and I've tried to be with you in it but I can't and sandy you think can. why can she? she reaches deep into you and I don't know you that way and trudy sometimes and c sometimes, and r, reach deep into me in a way, and josie, and daphne - reach parts of me you don't and yet I like the care we've given us. and I make you central in wanting to tell you what I learn with those people. I feel I'm somewhere not inspiring you or you're not letting me. until I do inspire you, and I have, too, although sometimes you flatter me when it isn't exactly so. but you inspire me in some way and that makes me think you're inspired too. maybe not the way you expect? we impatiently wait for the next inspired time. today you said 'when I do, you'll see me at the door' and I had an instantly subdued rage that you were making me unsure of myself and pleading for you to let me have access to you. that's what I imagine sandy and esther doing for you and you try it out but you don't like it. but why are you doing it now? it's testing my - what? involvement or weakness. I don't know if you are unsure of yourself (the version that flatters me) and want to see if I'll still be with you by preference / ie are we in some opening of you or if you are bored and lonely and want to see if I'll rally as a strong worthy companion who refuses to fall for your trick or will you in faith teach me what you know or have we taught each other already all we have to teach and the rest is loss of self but I don't think we've gone as far as we want or seen as much roy shut me out before I was ready, and killed me and drove me crazy and forced me to remake myself by doing that, and he didn't do it cleanly, he kept coming back to do it again sometimes I'm afraid you're doing that or will do it. yet roy and I made ourselves strong in each other's lives, even dishonestly and brutally - he also made me doubt and refind my sources of information is our lovemaking mediumistic you said transporting with t and c and you I feel how far out of my mother's life I am leading my own life, when I write luke I feel he's got away and yet I know I also know him and can help him to stay honest - oh I don't know him so well, luke you were lonely with me and yet you were brilliant, I hope you can be brilliant where you are and I'd like to be so safe and steady in myself I'd have light, clarity, love, oh honesty and bravery, enough to see them all in the way closest and realest to them. when I become myself and we all learn to love each other without preconceptions or holdouts. and you and I are we going to have trouble with that weaning for 30 years sez roy. oh maddening roy, his unmatchable quality at the same time as his outrageous brutality and selfishness how he got his power and what he did with it, dazzling performance to make me so ambitious to grow - inspiring - and I thought of madeleine too, her invention intervention as a continuing recurring reminder of a free magical way to be not held in, obedient, scared and conscientious the only difficulty was the way I could see both of them not remembering and so like a stunning beautiful brain damage a seduction like I imagine drugs and I connect both of them with it, madeleine knew it from young and it made her clairvoyant and roy too, both of them powerful because of their siddis (the way I'm scared of being powerful now, uncontrolled, and it seems to invite uncontrolled anger) because of not being good at the expense of being - but is it being oneself? or precisely being powerfully oneself) oh but the inspiration is like a reminder: I can live less heavily than I do, I'm giving up my enjoyment out of timidity oh but they're not responsible roy I wrote infected me with bad faith or need for revenge it's unresolved whether he opened and woke me or perverted me, same story as t and c and you my friends of now are inspiring and are responsible and I want to be both and I'm scared of getting out of control when I am myself, so I'd have responsibility I didn't have the reach to do right the sense of black and white and night, it was there in bravo's photographs too t and my and daphne's work [Was that Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Mexican photographer? I don't think so.] interior body what is the connection with death is it our imagining of death or does it represent a death we already are living in what do we know that we don't know we know daphne, I could ask tomorrow night photographs (andy) photographs with t talking about not liking to be on welfare and not imagining how to get off it intelligently the story of mat-makers and the tao josie's tale of her and moira's fights, sibhion's illness, their two separate exorcisms jam talking about how the belugas accuse us, because they can do it without touching I said, for me it's that they are improvising all the time I'm noticing that my eyes aren't good, they have a wobble I went to sleep wondering what I'd dream, excited, cold air. lying up on the pillows. I dreamed t c and r and others were going on a cruise on a yacht, at the last moment I was going to go too, an officer said I should rush to buckingham palace with the news*, an official letter among ourself, we talk about how to do it because they were regular passengers with meal privileges and I was a last minute addition. I said they should go into regular meals and bring back enough for me; they out of some idea of equality said we could all eat at the cafeteria of the ship, although I thought it would be worse food and besides cost too much. while we were discussing it seemed - I'm not sure where this was in the dream - we had given up all our misunderstandings and sentimentalities and were rapidly working through all our foolishnesses, we had decisive power, were clear and delighted, discovered we none of us wanted to go on that yacht trip (roy?) and were there playing in bright earlymorning sunlight. trudy came with rhoda and said 'I feel so free' *at this point I had a sensation of telling the two of them a dream very early on that described our situation these days, I remembered the feel of the room around us c: that privilege you mourn for, isn't that the lie that makes you say marriage is impossible, but you have no less appetite for it than ever and what does that mean I feel the difference now is that you've begun to take in my dowry gifts (oh paul) the sunday with j when we talked about the thoughts she doesn't think she has - my concrete researches and hers, being put to use - the bleach bottle, I said what if you took those images seriously she said she sidetracks them into fantasies of manufactury, I said what if you studied them differently riveted suddenly with excitement she sent a letter then that was she said about a bleach bottle - go out the door in rage, to daphne's and then past - and she's smiling, she wants to tell me a story, she goes far away into another time and I watch her tell 'sincerely' a story I don't believe, find myself outside it and she comes out too and laughs, tells about rhoda and is relieved. the one thing she [c] says that snags me is there was a spirituality about your sexuality, and then I remember the joy in it when it was / oh hypocrite I like best when we tell how odd it seems to us to have the particulars (body) we do have. the way she looks in her black cap. today it was as if easy after a while and then t and nothing happening and the cousin, when we were talking about the number of lives and having other babies I was watching the schwatz and glaring taking a distance and t was trying to shrink me and still it was in its way familiar and a pleasure, so long from the old pain she would come into such brilliant focus 'we are here to be conscious in everything, preparing to die' I was arguing that I don't want a theory about what life is for, or what dying is like, only its sometimes visits, intense, erotic, black and white fear and thrill I was thinking how much I'd tried to please them, she said she thinks I try so hard to please who I'm with that I betray who I'm not with, I said I imagined it completely differently oh she's so hooked on betrayal. I said I wanted to know things. the talk - it pulls more of itself. we gabble. intensely. the concentration even when it's guck - I'm learning sociality from them because I had to and now I'd like to - what a head false when she was talking her face went through faces I've never seen, a distant soul, a thought so foreign to mine, her, own, in privacy, and for once I could watch, the theories spin, she was a weaver, oh yeah, you did it, and talk talk talk philosopher, little one, at the table pyjama elbows on such a bright face ('trudy and I are more real and better friends than we've ever been') proprietary bless my bright children I'm off back to my own life and it's a good thing I have one because - - I'm ashamed / first from trudy / then the flat terrible with jamila in bed, she was looking all over my body for me and I disliked myself so much (because they dropped me that night again) (because of the people who are fancying me, and the film career) I just wanted to go away / she was lonely and I couldn't
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