| dames rocket 8 part 6 - may - june 1978 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
looking at my hands with pleasure the studebaker [I buy my first car, a cocoa-colored 1962 Studebaker Lark] [Castenada notes: likely from 1974 Tales of power
he had replaced your body giving the body a chance to store a memory the hole that a woman made when she emptied you - women know for a fact who emptied them ... gave her completeness to them drive her hard and without mercy until she no longer feels sorry for herself but somehow I was myself again don't you put your hands to your chest? men do that. women have wombs. they store their feelings there. draining ourselves with useless talk a complete person is one who never had children when the hole is on the left, the child who created that hole is of the same sex left is black, right is dark brown a woman emptied you, you made a child patch with his own luminosity you loved him, you honoured his spirit pay back to the spirit of man I looked up and saw myself as I had once been, thin, young, fresh. it was my spirit that was coming back to me. some edge is missing, some craziness, some nervousness, some power that they had before is gone ... energy and illusions children are complete, they move in leaps an empty man uses the completeness of a woman all the time a complete woman is dangerous in her completeness, more so than a man. she is unreliable, moody, nervous and also capable of great changes complete people always jump, somersault to be a sorcerer one has to have all of one's luminosity to recover the edge you have to steal it back I had to let my left side snatch the edge out of them I took the craziness out of them, they didn't need it, while I did besides, they still retain the edge they stole from their father entering that world while still alive a sorcerer who regains completeness is balanced / one who has never lost it is always a little off and are so taut they have no measure the double is white, like the sun we are pieces of the sun jog in place unbearable ticklish pain in the area just below my navel my flying opened us both I can't think (another's anger) in a desperate position do something unexpected the glow around the stomach - when the pull of something or a strong person has been too strong you have to throw up to be balanced and not to seek anything eagerly one is better off with nothing but one's purpose and freedom the mold. the human mold always found in water holes in order for us to be pushed by forces we must be like a sail or kite a radiant luminous being if we call it god it is the truth a warrior must drop the human form in order to really change the warrior tries to change, knowing she cannot she lost her human form and was weak when we have no form then nothing has a form our art as ordinary people is that we know how to hold the image of what we are looking at in dreaming we have to do it with just a glance a little pressure at the belly button to help hold the images during periods dreaming has power a crack opens in front of us, a little more crazy and daring ... two days before, a woman can open that crack and step through into another world let go of the images of the world the double needs a tremendous amount of attention you talk and act the way you do because you're clinging to the human form remembering dreams is part of impeccability my body tells me you're angry with me because I'm wasting myself. my weakness is that I'm made to have longings I long for the privilege of walking the earth as an ordinary person without this awesome burden unruffled is a sign of having lost form the two devils took his soul, and his mother's concentrate totally on trying not to be obvious consensual validation sorcerers always took the first event of any series as a map of subsequent making the leap the life we have now is just one long vision attention of the tonal first ring of power second is ability to place awareness on the nonordinary world attention of the nagual seeing and remembering what is seen a censored memory two distinct versions the crack is ability to change level of attention dreaming takes power. roll on the floor, earth gives energy - best way to get energy is to let the sun inside the eyes, esp left move head side to side to catch light in half closed left eye
we choose only once, whether to be ordinary or - we have lost our old purpose. the new one requires us to travel light as a breeze balancing the second attention, not with power plants power plants as boost you need power to handle power plants made you lopsided, you cut through your attention of the tonal directly into realm of second attention but without mastery over that attention
gazing. at a pile of leaves for hours without thoughts, attention of tonal wavers - second attention hooks onto leaves and they become something else stopping the world have someone else around leaves then small plants - are very dangerous, their power is concentrated, they have a very intense light and they feel when the dreamers are gazing at them - shoot it at the gazer trees draw their light directly from earth white moving living things - small insects innocuous yellowish rocks do not open up easily to gazers but have special secrets revealed in core - persist - can aid sorcerers in their dreaming when I gaze into the core of a rock I catch a whiff of a special scent proper to that rock, when I roam in my dreaming I am guided by those scents early morning trees and rocks are stiff and their light faint noon - gaze at them then to borrow their light and power in late afternoon and early evening trees and rocks were quiet and sad, especially trees at that hour trees give the feeling they're gazing back at the gazer cyclic phenomena, rain and fog can focus second attention on rain itself, move with it, or focus it on the background and use the rain as a magnifying glass to reveal hidden features
the feat of fog gazers is to let their second attention go into whatever place their gazing reveals - look for ghosts of things no longer there another series is distance and cloud gazing let the second attention go to the place they were gazing at the last series was fire smoke and shadow gazing for a gazer fire is not bright but black and so is smoke shadows on the other hand are brilliant and have color and movement in them star and water star gazing done by sorcerers who have lost their human form running water used by formless sorcerers to gather their second attention and transport it anyplace they need to go you went beyond your limits with running water a river gathers the second attention and takes it away and there is no way of stopping
let perception play without analysing
shadows early morning don't tell much around 6 they wake up best at 5 in the aft - fully awake they have heat or cold, move, have color dreamers must gaze in order to do dreaming and then they must look for their dreams in their gazing. made me gaze at shadows of rocks and then in my dreaming I found out that those shadows had light so I looked for the light in the shadows from then on until I found it gazing and dreaming go together. it took me a lot of gazing at shadows to get my dreaming of shadows going, and then a lot of dreaming and gazing to get the two together and really see in the shadows what I had been seeing in my dreaming not to fall into one another's webs a warrior has no compassion, for him to have compassion means you wish the other person to be like you - let them be and support them in what they are only a warrior who sees and is formless can help anyone but there was no floor - I became curious about the moment of my death, and I let go of myself. I experienced then an unequalled joy
jog in place facing the sun have to have two faces to fare well in both attentions if anybody sees something different, that was not there before, it is because that person's second attention has been gathered and that person is focusing it on something, whatever gathers that second attention - smoke, madness, etc the guardian] dream carmichael with a fair child, I'm somewhere living alone, we run through rain to his college, he's there plucking a live pigeon for lunch (later when I'm touching myself I know what it is) but it seems to get away, I don't want it plucked, go to the washrooms, they don't have genders but all 4 have long lines of women (they're on the roof) he's in a bed in one room, judy and mother are preparing a greek feast for judy's religion, mother (I think) is setting up a scene for a movie, they need more plants in the water I get an ivy they say it will die I say no I'll put it back later is it too blue? the blond woman director says yes I ask again is it too blue? yes she doesn't want my help, she's thrown carmichael a tender glance I go to carmichael's bed and we're both naked and amorous, he says your nipples are so big he talks about how because I'm with women I must now be very special, we're entwined and I'm going to fuck with him but then I start to think about jamila and I notice I have put my knee into his crotch j and I both pregnant are in the hospital, we want adjoining beds but another woman is between us: she is tired, flabby, an old housewife, she resists our wish out of envy and petulance. j's pregnancy is neat tight and lovely, just like mine. there is a 4th woman who is dark and sharp the joy of filmwork imagined fitzgerald's writing trudy's fun and distance pitt meadows dreaming of it because of the fucking we did with bach's suite sex and god god is the world and we can make it our father, mother, child, lover by our predilection or leave it as the blast, but yes the connection to people has to change joyce. the coming into the room exposed and helpless. luke. tears. yes and it is me. she is the witness and will be given what j isn't brave enough - strangeness of seeing her mistakes and being patient with them, she's not brilliant and has tricks. '... first thing that comes up is the most incomplete shape.' the child sent away. fear of the car sometimes I feel ideas reassuring me, that processes are completing themselves
what does it mean when people go into trances you have on a blue sailor suit. there's a lifeboat, you have your hand on the end of it, now you've let down that end and you invite me to get into it, I do and you do too and we're there under the pink quilt, now we're on the sea although I didn't see you let down the other end of the lifeboat, we're lying with our heads on the flank of a giraffe, there are some foxes and ezra is there too, it's early morning and the animals are all asleep now the giraffe is away and is looking ahead, his eyes make a sight line that pulls us, now we're going fast, the wind is making ezra's ears fly back, our hair is flying too, now I can see what we're going toward, it's a tree, standing in the sea, not on land, and I think that's the end of the dream the tree standing in the sea, a white circle spreads fast on the sea surface, a column goes straight up, around it a white mantle forms, through the top of it can be seen darker curled solid top of the tree, the mantle dissolves, an invisible heat wave spreads and at a certain distance clouds appear like the clouds already there, small white, arrive at circumference of a certain circle, I'm in avidity, fright, as if it were not cinema but the mythic time, the column is made of separate parts, falling the tree's head is in slow boil the column is shreds, falling at the base of the tree a white ring spreads out, it's vertical and horizontal exactness, spreads on planes lying in the dark, she found my secret and it made my sex burn toward her, the three points, the politicization of her female man, the two unmatched, who match I'm asleep, last night at the japanese restaurant shining toward the happy people (daphne: I want to sleep) (month of lime trees?) coming to the 4-way corner I was saying to nellie, 'i'm so happily married' and then seemed to recall a dream from when nellie was teaching me before, two years ago, and having got around the corner, told her this time we worked from her anger about my dream of her pregnant, through evening and morning of wrangling in ugly talk, until she cut down to something direct and spoke in a voice that went right into my body and inflamed it so I knew it had been true, and then how we didn't stay in that direct truth but felt our way through more and less focused language, not eating, sleeping little, to laughing and enough ease to tell that story I've had a sense of a human mind I am a specialized node of, that is a way of giving up knowing everything because the modes of knowledge, different in every one, and I have only this ellie epp's particular fate / no, enlarged I held my father out and now I'm bringing him back, why (his handwriting) at this age I'm beginning to know how his mind works a room in a house, taught me to write sense of resistance, the present seems eternal, as if it is always the same day, but the future is dense and I can hardly believe it will be in writing, and why do I stay away from it month after month when I love it more than everything and it's my mesh people who die young, maya deren, plath, sexton, agee, fitzgerald and zelda, arbus, roethke, lawrence people who live old, frost, o'keefe, martin, leonardo, cunningham, ib'n arabi medium old, stein shame at the evasion in what's called private thought not recognizing the contemporaneity of everyone does ellie epp have to stay a clear tributary in this enlarged person the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads trudy said on the phone 'you're so far away it would take me hours to find you, I can't talk to you today I had a beautiful, glorious day, open, downtown' when I was separated from my mother, did I lose my self? xios, langageless, into a strange place, and in that place, confined, subjugated, at the tenderest age, broken connection. - or - at the tenderest age the little child breaks her connections and is taken to a strange world where another language is spoken by rich children who know each other and despise her but it is an interesting world is it at that moment she leaves the present and makes an interesting world the father is far away and this world has young women mary was 24, he 26, both so young, knowing nothing. little ellie's very sick, then she's better but she can't walk and so she's confined, sent to jail, sent away, leg folds under her, what's there to know about what they felt then, he dismay for his responsibility, she for the child who is herself, the bright fast curious one alone with a mother, she was revising her own childhood in this little one, who kept her good company in the house lies arrived with me, a disturbance, mary had something beside herself to protect, and a way of protecting herself
the great cranky graintruck, I don't understand its controls is this the gas pedal? yes, and this one is too, but I make it go, I think for a while I'm in the intermediate zone behind valhalla, where I was before in a snow dream (is it farnsworths'?) down the roads very fast, it's summer dawn, there's a crashed car, I swing around it, the big junky cab, dark. I have to get onto the floor to see all the funny contraptions his notebook is on the floor, it's an artist's notebook. I think I'll go into la glace for the mail seem to ride through a room with books just the bookcases standing ceiling height, no ceiling someone has died the man who watches me drive through the corridor is executing the will out on the street there are beautiful small things fossils pottery glass I pick up a glass thing like a coral, it's the man on the corner who spread them this morning the body's exactness I was there only to go into bodies with you by a little movement of your mouth I knew to ask you for what you were afraid to say what's this prim voice how is it in these days. coming back to local and feeling unconnected, as if about to join another world. this cultural world is irrelevant, is there somewhere to want. going far into eros with beautiful jamila, consent to its everlastingness. and yet - where's the other place and being married, distracted and married, yes alright, I needed it and am consenting but abstractly, because where - ? wrongness in the social times, again, I don't find the closeness to them that gives me something to say the artificial intimacy the mobile home what is going on I went to daphne's father, saw an uncomfortable woman but didn't see past what I suppose was her eroticism, spoke to her exactly as expected, and spoke to daphne the same way, right inside the conventions of relation, without any sincerity; he was the comfort of patriarchy as well as his own beauty, in the bedroom a legendary mirror in a gold frame, nothing else - but chandeliers -
from that failure to sitting with d in the car, she didn't insist, ashamed from that failure to the upstairs house, unlock and greet dog and take off jacket and the sleeper looks up, and get into bed, saying a little, but it's for the body, that so quickly greets, bites, makes itself dark sharp cavernous rings now I lie still and let you make it ring surfaces and inner parts all dark wet space night rain pouring black window panes granulated wet every surface there's my body cavity and then your back under my arm, that was the one thing we were sensation, not many pictures this time this morning your breast loosened itself for my hand sweet little one alive hello little one round it and round it the hard gaze of its focus, my palm riding over it in all this blessing I'm afraid and want to give something back giving it to you isn't a gift, miracle, how you look - dream - what? - I want something to sharpen - the moral existence - [Gurjieff I think: not a consciousness nourished on one's own history, but witnessing, which is lucidity and spontaneity the trial of love is living out the mystery of the mythology in the precision and care of causality the collective stream of inner images eros a nonpersonal logos too sleep - dreams, imagination, considering, anxiety whatever we identify with has power over us, wastes and destroys the inner life do not identify, and see where it takes you steward often when it comes near, difficulties self-remembering when you're doing it right, sense of force coming in, as of an opening. stop and do something else emotion, use intelligence to remember exactly what happened buffers. prevent 2 inner voices from coming together shocks teach observation of everything, to make a new memory of oneself events are hypnotic and try to get us to collude the key on which personality turns wrongly go into the other and see yourself from them depression. low vitality, effort takes you out] the tentative pain, scare whether it's a good instinct or a bad one, or just the movement of an organism convulsing from one position to another / forcing the immanent / respect / paternalism drugs / integrating / parachutes garden, the loved house, loves me back c straight sheathed brown bright 'I love you and I wish you well. say goodbye" the stun 'she doesn't find you in your soul. she does things to your mind' 'she does things to my body too' 'you were always loving to me' 'you loved yourself with me' 'yes I loved myself with you and that's why I loved you' the table in that afternoon acrossed sense of not liking the person I was being, but having to persist sexual ownership / what in what you said pulled me to you with such an open body, it was truth in your voice touching the bottom of the sea but the world went to sleep around the body the body became music and space we learned to find the other's sensation in our own making love to the world, is it that touching the places of it that touch me but it isn't all lovemaking c's photographs with each one in a lone space, it looks like a unit and mirror her angel was there for a moment, when I saw it across the table I was shocked and frightened in my fallenness I think you didn't meet me somewhere and then I was lost 'it wasn't good enough'
vacant possession / the way I think you have more for self a broken fence
when j junks me and she's never taken me to robin the sense of lost comes as I'm falling asleep music when it works, immediate slight grab the craziness is here again, pain is different, this is after driving, as if arrival of a bad field 'I'll never let you out of my influence,' I do hate you trudy old times it was evil epp, olivia, roy, and jamila's bare witch too jam would not acknowledge my desperation or hear the story / aren't you crazy too? why am I frightened of the sense (someone is stoned) of battle and what is wrong in the way I understand it. they try to capture souls. maybe I hardly had one but now it seems mostly in danger 'does she ground you?' nellie of c the information in hate the mind is bigger than me, an ecology in which I am and am not; artemis. did I think I was joking? choose the god carefully. athena goddess of wisdom. I can't have both? earthly father and heavenly companion
there are too many questions, I falter and don't know which part of it to be [Jam and I in London 22 May - 18 June, at first staying together in the Y near the British Museum, and then J stayed on alone in the Y while I house-sat an empty flat JoAnn Kaplan knew about in Woolwich] [international driver's license photo] A certain caravel sayling in the West Ocean, about the coastes of Spayne, had a forcibly and continuall wynde from the East whereby it was dryuen to a land unknown, & not described in any map or carde of the sea, & was dryuen stil along by the coaste of the same for the space of many dayes, untyll it came to a haven where in a short tyme the most part of the mariners, beying long before very weake & feeble by reason of hunger & traveyll, dyed. So that only the pilot, with three or four other, remained alive. And not only they that dyed, did not inioye the Indies whiche thy first discouered to theyr misfortune, but the residue also that lyved had in maner as little fruition of the same: not leaving, or at the least not openly publishing any memorie thereof, neyther of the place, or what it was called, or in what yeere it was founde. Albeit, the fault was not theirs, but rather the malice of other, or the enuie of that which we call fortune. I do not therefore marveyle, that the ancient histories affyrme, that great things proceede and increase of small & obscure begynnynges, syth we have seen the same verified in this fynding of the Indies, being so notable & new a thing. We neede not be curious to seeke the name of the Pilot, syth death made a short end of his voyages. Some wyl, that he came from Andaluzia, & traded to the Ilandes of Canaria, and the Iland of Madera, when this large & mortal nauigation chaunced unto hym. Others say that he was a Byscanne, and trade into England & Fraunce. Other also, that he was a Portugale, & that either he went or came from Mina or India: which agreeth well with the name of these newe landes, as I have sayd before. Agayne, some there be that say that he brought the Caravell to Portugale or to the Iland of Modera, or to some other of the Ilandes called De los Azores. Yet do none of them affyrme any thing, although they all affirme that the Pilot dyed in the house of Christopher Colon, with whom remained all suche witynges and annotations as he had made of his voyage in the sad Caravell, aswell as such thynges as he observed both by land & sea, as also of the elevation of the pole in those landes which he had discouered. From preamble of Richard Eden in deede Colon was not greatly learned: yet of good understanding conferred as touching the like thinges mentioned of olde autours because he was a straunger and went but in simple apparell, not otherwise credited than by the letter of a grey frier, they belieued hym not neyther gave eare to his woordes, whereby he was greatly tormented in his imagination. although many judged hym phantasticall, as in the maner of ignorant men, to cal all suche as attempt any thing beyonde theyr reach, and the compasse of theyr knowledge expert and cunning traueylers what it is to be a skilful traueyler, what to bee a paineful Geographer, and learned be it neuer so full of difficulties, will become as plausible as any other iourney when the large & mortal nauigation chaunced unto hym
12 June Wake with Jamila under my eyes, hair and teeshirt, realize I like the color of the teeshirt because it is the color of her cunt, she sits up to blow her nose, lies down again eyes red corrugated with veins, from the time I wake I am not alone, she sits up earlier to write something on my blue sheet, the navigation title, that she tears off later, I feel sorry for my indifference, not sorry but uneasy, get into her bed and we sleep wrapped together, or she sleeps and I don't quite but it's easy for the bodies, overcast. I begin to feel panic about Luke, what shall I do, say I won't be able to think about it until later, but she invites me to think with her over breakfast, I realize I am put into a waiting for her to ask the questions. My language with her is very bad and pompous these days although last night with all the waiting at bus stops I saw sky and friendly bus interaction (a woman shouting outside the bus, a boy's voice behind, We're standing on her foot, J's delayed laugh). No simple being, I'm like Luke, freaked into a terrible social voice, except that I hear myself and am ashamed; we walked down all the stonecolored streets with their curbs, all at angles, starting to talk about Luke, I'm in her hands and want to scream, but she isn't getting to that, we sit down in the same place, I'm annoyed at her habitualness, as last night, I've said I don't want him because his context is so uninteresting and I feel overwhelming failure to give him a context he can be interesting in, also that in my coldness I feel I'm my father, who sacrificed us to daydreams, and failing at the daydreams too. Her replies aren't anywhere, although she asks if I want her to push and I say by all means. Her face focuses and she asks whether I could have him for the summer and take along another woman to cook and look after him, we both think of Daphne and light up with relief at the picture of both of us working in a farmhouse and the two boys together on the fields, it would give me something to do when I'm not working, and someone to talk to, but then I said it's a very immodest proposal and stopped in confusion. It would keep me off you for the summer. And I quickly swore I would stay away from her for the summer, hurt, she hurrying to say, Don't promise because if you do you'll break it. Betraying her contempt, she is so controlled my uncontrol gets worse and harder to bear. Said bye abruptly and saw her peripherally following me, she wanted not to have that abrupt leaving, borrowed £30, I went back up the hill, made coffee, thought about fasting, was in pain and turmoil, read the magician book for an hour, bathed and went to do yoga, a stretch up, forward, small of back, then sat with eyes closed having 'thoughts,' my points of tension, Luke, T and C, J, dope, work. They rotate. Salvation. I don't have any 'will' or decision, feel useless and lost, am afraid for Luke and of my punishment for those mistakes, lay on the floor under the blue blanket, wondering if I must cut my helplessness off from Jamila and my friends, the more I am helpless with them the more I seem to dislike them, myself I was going to say. It came from wanting to have my sins discovered, or holes, to be able to go on enlarged. The magician book / I don't like the Christianity but I wonder if I have to work with what my child was taught, the sense of sin - weakness that separates from the knowing. Wondered what I could pray to, my grandparents are in my imagination as some success, the immigrants who took their children (they had each other, said J). Lost goodness, weakness and badness, trying to find the knowing one, revision of social life, speaking to the angel, dissolving fear in love and trust, I wonder about the invocation of evils, also making yourself so vulnerable by destroying the innocent protections, Don't trust exteriorizing the way he does, angels and devils, and yet need to call and see the devils, in fantasy? and in this gift life Familiar desperation Familiars The advantage of creatures outside is that they can be unexpected My thoughts with J do not get well completed We wonder if our lovemaking weakens us so much It was [?] said the man in the grocery store, gentian violet coming in tomorrow said the chemist, down the hill to the train, the magician in pocket, sitting very still in sharp pain, knowing the plan with Luke is no good for now, C is in me as a good force and T as a bad one, J is glamour, but holding still around it, I thought if I can just learn to sit out pain w/o turning it into anything but itself, especially not action, the sense that I have such an amount of wrongness to discover in myself and yet wondering if to pay attention to the wrongness is simply to make it and to make a world out of it; and rightness if I made a world out of it wd be a good home for me. I don't like the schism or the onedimension. This existence with other people just not wanting to be them. Thinking of the drastic aloneness of the summer, wondering if it is a practical expedition, I feel myself a nastiness that people can only get wronged with, and now I'm so shamed with J and with Luke even. Thinking of the fortune teller's description, conflict. I don't know anything, I am no direction and don't know or love my existence. Covent Garden was sold out, ate a pound and a half of cherries, some strawberries and a peach and went home, was interested by a nervous elf in green shoes, I think I will have to write but can I offer it to any good without becoming a baby, remember C, "I believe in you, you're a free spirit, you'll get it back" think of her brave decisions Writing - to make a clear voice, I've lost the gift of energized voice for reading? Went to sleep wanting to dream Luke, am too divided to believe in my own disciplines, slept but couldn't remember, had coffee after. I haven't spoken about the story with J since we were here Airplane, her misery, showing in awkwardness, ugliness, I'm contrite and don't like myself so placating, suggest the b and b in the country because I'm afraid of going into the city so painfully separate. At night we rage, it's still about how I rushed in and called the meeting and so got her into T's clutches because of how attractive T was in that panic of mine; I am scared of what will happen if she and T get together. I produce the wine and argue that I couldn't help myself, that I was furious T was taking something from C again, that I love C, and that we have known flying, J and I. In the morning I go for a walk and see a fine tree I don't know how to address, In London we look unsuccessfully but kindly for a b and b, but find the Y by an instinctive turning, I am dismayed by losing my way and making mistakes visible to her. At Jimmy's get pleasantly fed and drunk together. Go to R's, camp, and I see Luke. Sleep together in the tent for the first time. Next day we're in the Y, go to my movie [Trapline happens to be programmed at the Co-op], I fail to do what I want, and so miss my chance at the Co-op, we have a stupid evening at Andy's and only a little time with JoAnn is right, sleeping and waking together is so intense I am unable to do anything else and go into a fog, lose the rest of the week, go with Luke to the Sufi farm, eat cookies there, Christina and her friend Catherine are broken mirrors, only her pain and creation is alive there, when we come back Luke asks the right questions and I meet them right but R and Sara give me the creeps, and his voice with them. I am lighter with J and have the instinct to go to the river with her, on the way home, the lights please us and there's the church, but torment close by, and I'm staying at Luke's, see Christie, another week is lost, I go to Sissinghurst, try to clear myself of the fog in us both, misery, try to break our spell with the letter, she's hurt, intense pain in us both, get drunk at Andy's, next day go to find her and get the firm voice, am at the bottom, say I'm still married because we did it lucidly and I don't want to break it in pain or discouragement, I can have this firmness because I know she's hurt, say I came because I was in such terrible pain I couldn't stay away, I am believing what I say for the first time in weeks, the trees seem fine presences, the sky please me, I lie stretched on it free of her glamour and thoroughly confessed, she kisses me, it starts to rain, I am carrying the paper and we take it back to the hotel. I go to JoAnn's and it is quite a fine time. Next day to Woolwich, last Monday and sleep with the window open and dream well. Tuesday she comes out here and I like it that she does but I have my detachment and can love the trees' movement. She leaves sad but works well. In the evening I'm with Luke embarrassed after close encounters, friendly.
Dream. First Gma and Gpa's house, M had made very many cookies; guests, grandchildren, kittens, puppies, happiness. I felt, here it is again, the simple capability of happiness, it needed the house full. A Mennonite doctor, checking me over injects something into my shoulder I feel in my brain; he wants to do an e.e.g. because I have little raised dots (like on chest) on my scalp, I tell him about the acid, he goes off, I look for my shoes and can't find them anywhere, C's there with her new shoes I liked on account of the stitched soles, I can't find the shoes still, he comes back and I ask him about the e.e.g., he says "You really want to know?" in a humorous way. "It's terrible, I can't tell you more than that but it's terrible. Never do that again." He says, "How's your academic work?" I say "It's fine, but academic work is easy. What I don't have anymore is my ..." To Christina I said that what I fear to lose is the instinct of direction. June 13 Woke having dreamed happiness with Grandma and Grandpa's house, and brain damage, pain and irresolution, helplessness, resolve to disappear from all my connections into a retreat where I would exorcise my frights and rebuild my brain. Silence, give up J. Was going to give up breakfast but decided to invent less punishing discipline. Fury at my helpless self, at J's holding everything back, crying, saying I have to learn another relation to pain, to sit still around it. J calm but I won't have her wisdom. Dillons. Salvation books, books for Luke. R meets me with tears in his eyes too, when I say I'm in pain, identity crisis. Luke is glad to see me. R is honest for a little, then goes into quoting and entertainment. Luke likes the books. Sara absorbs my misery. Jill [Chisholm] invites. - Sore and dry mouth; comforted by kindness, skateboard, straightening the knees and edging a turn; found the space/time book; Sal's [Potter] rosy silence; Jill's and my arms getting further from our bodies, she said and repeated, What you're doing is very hard; J on the steps under the eyes lizard and tired; Christie's Georgie in red lips and a petticoat, the two young bodies took off their clothes and performed, it was easy to take the long bus home. The marble's worlds. Tarthang Tulku 1977 Time, space and knowledge: a new vision of reality Dharma Publishing Poets begin in delight with beauty and go to pain said the Sufi but he's no one. They are more likely to be perverse because what they do is perverse. During the night a woman immigrates to a new world, others go in couples, but she finds a way to go back to the old one, there's something she needs, things packed in a box, some candles laid on top, she's getting advice, she goes to sleep as the harvester goes around the field, or blanks out, the advice is how to make it seem sleep so that she'll be excused by her worldmates, there's more about a man, gay, who won't admit but is forced when another man and a boy are found in his upper bunk. A church pushes into his backyard, then pulls out again. I go back to the Hotel Sofitel and find Madame Matter on a lower floor than she was before, I sit down and say Do you know me? She says It's Ellie Epp. Another blond woman comes in and says How long has it been, I say I was 18 then (I was 20) and am 34 now, that makes 16 years. I ask about Darinka and say I would never have found her address in Chicago. Ask for Jean Jacques Gaté (actually not), he's in Chicago a union leader, women are crazy about him. At the end of the dreaming the woman was trying to get back, or on the way, lying strapped down on flat beds in a row of 5 or 6. - Written in the hamburger house in Woolich, concentration is far away and I'm making an ugly world, Annabel [Nicholson] sitting in bed looking lovely, she reaches for me as I'm telling her about Luke and pain, later she tells me hers, the eyes keep separate from the speech, her face shows itself more behind her hair, the person more a bold soprano, twigs on black paper with wax, stone walls, images and stories making me rejoice, her love of the inanimate, music, voices more and less polite, I wonder about learning a technology of relaxing my lonely friends, she liked to see me and yet the back and forth got posed and distant; oh ferocity, heaviness, fatigue, gaining; at the Co-op the woman I looked at looking back thoughtfully; landscape constructions. Lightning rods to bring down, a row of glass rods making the crossed light. J at the door swollen and pestilential, what she called partial fucking, wondering why I am willing for the parts to connect while the talk is flaccid/unhappy/disliking. We are stuck in [sketch] A hillside model with cress growing on it for trees. During the night, a strange city, the same one throughout, dark, two houses, one had Bhante, lean, in good shape, the other I think was Mafalda. Intimations, thinking alongside, dreaming, to remember. Paradox. what's its effect ritualistically Prim needing ritual to accomplish certain kinds of things / and disengage the social Focusing close, it's not knowing what is a clue and what isn't. Superstition and fright.
Still when I come out of thinking to unpack the butter etc, I have a sense of being in the 'real' world by mistake or convention and that I live somewhere not in Ellie Epp. That's because I don't like her. [Back in Vancouver] what elements are translation/transduction (visible to invisible) / transmutation were/are there conspiracies, political, to prevent knowing the fright. is it the organism or the social teaching. the way the sky and its action, in clouds, thrilled us when we were lying down in the park, and then the light on j's white clothes, lilac shadows, the grass blades separate, ezra, a joy, like acid, I wondered what had happened while we sat there and after a while started to laugh. sweet back, the feel like what's in her fingers, but the doubt, leaving. - birth initiation marriage rest death - no part for work 5 stations of the year silver fir - first day of year, birth tree of northern Europe furze - spring equinox (gorse) heather - solstice, the midsummer tree, red and passionate, associated with mountains and bees (in Europe, lime) aspen poplar - autumn equinox yew - death tree in all countries - last day of the year, eve of solstice - stands - said the churchyard yew has a root in every corpse's mouth sisters, they stand next to each other in the circle of the year. old months
halcyon days 7 before and 7 after winter solstice cross-quarter days, 4 irish fire feasts candlemas (quickening), may eve, lammas aug 2, hallowe'en
feeling actions ritually midsummer night most potent for evil spells, yarrow wards June 20 I'd been unconcentrated, downtown, buying the shirt and pants, love because the silk is beautiful, the color, some sense of wrong because it's leaving clean saintliness for power; missing j arrived, when I went to the telephone my mind went to 7 and I hung up conscientiously but then redecided and did call and no answer, it turned to pain and restlessness as if news and I wondered if the 7 - tried to resolve it alone but took the need to act into flowers, stopped the bus by their force, and came in to see her back turned arranging flowers the same color in a glass. dry throat and her stare. home on the bus, in the pain but moving right. the pain is separation/doubt and it's self and other-resistance. remembered that the light was on in the corridor. one evening in london, stepping down a lane in evening light, bliss arrived, your upper arm, putting my arm through yours so I could have my fingers round your upper arm, the facades, we were alone on that street going to the river we had left a room with a dormer window and its light you wanted to live together and I couldn't stand your beauty, or to be wrong next to you she bought me tampax and put them with the food provisions I said she mustn't but I was wrong / I was afraid of how weak I was, and then went to sissinghurst, and cooked up my independence and was in woolwich in frightful pain, but alone, and then she got sick from the separation maybe and our lovemaking wore us out I was scared of the lovemaking, it seemed to exhaust and sicken us although it was glaucous and entrancing so little energy we didn't fight, just sickened the evening, summer evening through the church windows looking across to the west, it returns and I wonder why, did I make a promise, it's as if a whisper why did they build a new church, different from the ones their fathers - Saturday 24th early, a bit of the alarm, asleep again, you're a downslope toward the light, shall we get up in a hurry, I lean on my arm over you to see the clock, 7, companion, it was good last night, a good current, as if there was a meteor shower, I have to tell you this, laugh, last night, the way I knew how turned on I was, was, when you got into bed and I moved over, I looked down and saw myself, and had a flash of lust - the brown car, proudly shifting to second and third, freeway, there's grass I can't look at, I'm not free, I'm forced to sit in the path of this constant road, cars, I only have time to look for danger, my foot shakes holding down the gas, less as we go on, may I kiss you? no absolutely not I don't like my language with you we're speaking alike pedantically with artificial hobble of your disguise, this language is too crude and big for us, ('like a glowing coal, a sort of warm triangle' 'for me it wasn't hot, it was very cool, and exquisite') (I gave myself a picture, detoured my imagination so I could come, it, in, something white, in, I see it, I push it, you push it, light, pausing, your breath is changed as if the picture I made is entering you / me in, in, in a grab and a flutter, did you feel it?) (was it because I'd been asleep and found the desire before you came, oh, my thoughts are there, that means I - yes, and we can - scratch toenail dog, eyes closed, head turned, hand open, two neat licks, I look, oh good laugh, why are you so cheerful? why am I tearful? oh - oh, because I've just had a bleachbottle coming into clearbrook behind the wheel the café, and a couple of owmches having a look at us, straw hats with grey bands, shirtsleeves and suspenders, eventually there are five, a pigeon babble, laughing, comfortably talking about tod, the clean old men, worldly people with a seedy look, I heard some of my father's story-telling tone, meantime jamila, jamila across, has taken the headband off and put her hair into an elastic and is the unhidden lovely face, steady, I'd go anywhere with her, she says when I go to the mirror these days I see this girl I don't know, she comes around to my side of the table and talks about how maybe the buddha gets everybody sooner or later, ananda and kuan yin, they were still hooked on love, what did they love? the buddha and the world, oh but that's different ananda wasn't fat because he was running around being a wife in the laundry room at the y, a woman come back from katmandu, it snows lightly in the foothills, a spiritual place the M in her palm parking in the drive, I see a shadow moving right, then her slow walk left, we both laugh to have that private look, he's tired, I start to show the car but he's saying hello nicely to j, she's blue around the mouth, when we sit down she tells me the story, closing her eyes, the whole story from christmas onward, ich wolte nicht am weinachten sterben, ich hatte ein grossen willen, ich wolte leben he has brought a book of mennonite history and sits on the arm of l's chair in his dark blue shirt, his round stomach has shrunk a little, he's easy but tired, she speaks, closing her eyes, when she opens them I see fright, she's furtive and I see it only in a flash, we go outside, she says gratulieren zu dein neuen auto and shakes my hand, I show her the seat put down; we walk round the back and see grandpa and jam weeding, she and I pick some peas, leaving bruises on the bloom of the ones that aren't hard enough, we shell them, j and I on the grass, grandma's in the lawn chair in her cotton dress and cardigan, j goes to weed more and comes back with the hoe what do you call that? we call it a cheenes fork how do you do this? is this right? he gets up off the arm of grandma's chair to teach her hoeing, grandma and I watch, when they're together at the end of the potato row I'm remembering the dream of him with roy ('I looked at you once when I was hoeing. you looked as if you were in mythic time.') (I liked looking at you today.) getting in the car with the round man and driving him to the store; in the old black dodge, jumping into the back seat and he would buy me an ice cream coming back: maryanne dressed, swollen in her face, is she centred on my aberration and roseanne's? the anita bryant editorial in a church paper, 'moral confusion', 'deepest instincts', peter is as if afraid of me now, maryanne saying she wouldn't understand my film; when he told the story of the woman who fell asleep smoking and set her chair on fire, they showed her being carried out, I think she might have been nude too - we laugh a lot, especially maryanne and I, our embarrassment at his prurience proudly betrayed later when grandma is raving about the tenants who broke windows, renters, and cut down a tree, I look at maryanne in my distress because I think she knows while we're washing up maryanne saying (of the dishes) everything is so mixed up around here peter jumping to talk about his first car and not letting grandpa tell the story of his, a '32 chev, in '48 accidentally finding townline road, a path, a track, a lake of grass, it's a lake! gravel, and a spot in front of plants red-stemmed coming out of gravel, green, many greens, with grass, and blue sky reflections, a few clover purples and next higher up the yellow flowers, oh museum, comfort, color, free, shine: goodness into my middle, lying down, the poplars clapping, she came near enough to touch, lying under cloud cover, a few drops and then more, why are you laughing isn't it raining on you? this has happened before. that was different, bigger drops. yah. a purple grass with damp sandcolored beard of roots for diana should I pull? I am allowed, in this place but I shouldn't have going home driving starts to be bad, we sleep tight up and I wake hoping I never lose her, the way she pulled her hair out of the elastic by turning her head the last paragraph is after going to the garden and planting that grass, repentance, and then loving and looking as it got dark, eyes not sure of themselves, and walking through sweet night on hastings to buy candles there are pink roses, all the trees have grown, feverfew and poppies, chamomile planted at the gate I can still feel the car's shudder in a dream 4 trees, the last one to be named, I see flowers, say it's dogwood in my dream I show a movie of landscapes first, then an old woman tossing on a bed, tall gaunt hair back her face is silver, darkens and lightens - that's approximate - as she turns it. she's dying, when the lights come on I see grandma in the audience looking uncomfortable j and I fighting and yet when our heads were together on the pillow I felt roses and falling asleep was in mythology grandma's face, it's small, has the eyes dislocated behind thick glass, the nose is skeletal, the rest soft she's too interested in success, the way she shuts her eyes and when she opens them, the blue, it's a shock of someone else, a rodent, compassion says old and good, dispassion says she sold to goodness and oldness, the tyrannical right to bore, and I gave it too, thinking piously that if I listened well I could lead her out of her disguised fright du hast angst zum sterben, speaking her language brokenly. ich hab angst, das du nicht vertig sein wirst, ich will mit alle kinder im himmel sein. but I don't want to be in heaven with all her children. what it is to be in front of just her face, who's luise. (wir haben uns gleich geliebt) does her duty, uses herself, she's frightened and obsessed but what's revolting isn't that, it's something (dann kann ich bischen herunter sneakin) small, it's old-child, I did well, see I was brave and strong, everybody says so, the doctors say so. I don't like helplessness. it's an expression of cunning and is as you called it an animal face
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