| edged out 10 part 3 - 1984 october-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
October 1984
Why today am I sore in relation to J and them again - is it her feeling better because I'm stuck and not with Michael. I hate the sickness, it says I don't like the baby. If I aborted, grief, weakness, guilt. I don't know what else to do. Would I start wanting it again. The slavery - shame - Despair In my stinking house alone / doing nothing / wanting nothing /
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It buys work, commissions research A housekeeper, a house, somebody very fun, personal secretary, Irish, for parties, for talk - feeding gifts. An economist. House with a garden and a housekeeper couple. A sleuth. Vegetables and fish, soup. Housekeeper 6 to 2, cook 4-8 for parties, secretary 11-7.
What does it do with the work it buys - features - gives Advocates by mixing - - At times leaning forward intently looking. The times I was leaning forward intently reading her face. The times I would be leaning face forward mouth open listening watching the distresses of her face. They slide through the exposures Sound of small movements in a space * A slur that I'm doing the work that will interest the girls Through the transparent darkness poured I didn't build forward on my warmth except * Images at intervals As never before Bring it as close as it will come * Fear of losing the soul is the frontier
* I'm getting into a car with a man I don't know. I seem to have chosen at random to go off with him. J's face watching from far back inside the room. Being a door for somebody. Sponsoring somebody. Testing and watching is there dominance fantasy in it When you're lacking[?] there I'm in revolt thinking I'll get you, I'll do it with a man, you won't get me.
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- Pregnant women increased protein [list of protein counts of foods] [notes on birth, notes on nutrition]
Commodity exchange very powerful role organizer as specialization, ie capitalism's power of control How kinship fits? He calls them 'integrative relationships' Within sociosphere: the economic - the exchange roles - Distribution of money - Production or transformation of value (through some human time) - 'Finance' "distribution and relation of balance sheet items: debt securities, real capital, net worth"
The development of ideologies of trust before complex financial systems The polity - domestic and international - legitimated threat International deterrence is threat-counterthreat which is unstable because it has to occasionally show the threat is not empty The sphere of information The terms of trade - below a certain value the trade will stop
Where the production of something is below its equilibrium level an abnormal profitability Centrally planned and market-dominated economies Kinds of action of an economic unit
Scientific subculture values on curiosity, veracity, careful observation, experiment, measurement "Exchanging the time of day"
Redefinition of full employment
'Opportunity cost' what else you could have been doing 'Real cost' toil and trouble of getting it Increased productivity means things cost less 'Value' in economics is exchange value 'Normal or equilibrium value' is Rich or poor according to how much of others' labour one can command or by the more orderly oppression of law those who are called philosophers whose trade it is not to do anything but to observe everything in appearance, to pay their debts in proportion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness 'Effectual demand' means neither under or over: just the supply that will get the 'natural price' Monopoly and secrecy, all restraints of competition 1. wages 2. profits 3. rents
A stock of unemployed - low productivity in the backward sector Town and country first instance of colonies Making the rules such that the skilled and not the vicious 'Unrecouped benefits' 'neighbourhood effects' 'externalities'
Subsidizing the taste of a few More less less spending on public goods / private Issues productivity and distribution The classes which maintained learning and manners at the cost of slavery or drudgery by the mass Human cost
Inflation 1. over issue of paper currency 2. rise in prices because - increasing demand for stuff - increase in circulating money Inflationary spiral when value of money is lowered / wages increased / prices rise / because there's more power to buy than there is stuff to buy? Devaluation is always to reduce the value of one's debts?
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[couple more pages of tarot notes] Movements of pain What shall I do with the little boy - I refuse his father - today it's as if I can't love him because I don't love his father - I can't stand his sleazy father - is to say, it's me that's sleazy, and then: how did it come about - by having no lover, having no hope of - being in despair - only the image of his light frame and holding - while I thought it was a girl I could fancy I made a coup of control, the story now becomes / that I was in a corner. Trying to speak as if it's only me. It's too late - I'm alone in my work It's too late, why, because she got a book and I didn't Because she's gone on to them and lies about it Because she put me through those three years saying she didn't want me Because the only revenge I could get is going on harming me Because I can't be an open heart with her without it being abused I'm alone in my work. What I have to find in it is my own valuing of it. Why haven't I. Cos she's a more skilled writer and I would have to try to get her view. Then I'll be left with lesser writing. Is it better than none. Will it bring a life.
I'm alone with my work - that keeps making me cry - work - that should make me glad - I'm alone with my - baby? Last time. - The unfallen world behind time remains as a background to the figured beats of serial progression long search through space and time for her lost and fallen half a double preserved in the upper world Of his first souls he has now no remembrance Moses lifting the snake Entrapment of a soul from another world into (vested misunderstanding) The brain a womb in which he goes on unborn The third eye is the first eye
Gamete must throw half its genetic endowment away "The sudden opening of the heart," opening the heart to the light of the sun
A subdominant line of expendable inexperienced males To complex to be ruled by the intimate mores and customs of mother-child society Put in a chest, sent down the river, washed up, grown into a tree, tree cut off
[couple of pages of eating records]
Calendar
Lug - lycos - lag - leg - a plant lygos "prehistoric" "flowered in three colors" - a bower Katamenia monthly - a ikathados, an anodos - lygos withies January new moon - first day of gamelion - Hera's gamos - the gamelia sacred to weddings - this was the node that linked solar to lunar once per year - Janus Agon - a contest in the darkness there Mid-July - then the women's wantonness blazed out - and that Adonis feast upon the roof Summer a period of 8 months from March 6 the evening rising of Arcturus to November 8 the morning rising of the Pleiedes [ovulation records July 1983 to October 1984, with notes on natural birth control] 28 Sunday. Going out in bright air to buy milk-apple-banana-orange - when I tell Paul, to hear how it is, we're both lively - he says don't be hard - notebooks, Valhalla, worried mass, sweet her and the terrors, can I set writing with window - amn't into decision mind yet - yoga. 29 Early - grabbed by a corpse - notebooks grabbing sequence to know what happened since 1981 took the morning - yeast and lemon juice - biting cold - afternoon I get desperate - almost call - call T - "I need to talk" - "I told her 'You've been pushing her away for a long time and now she's pushed off you're acting like a -'" - lumps she's had - "She'd make me feel I was worthless" - sick - hair dropping. 30 Night waking - I'm stronger! like charge - thinking maybe it is Jill - is it true, the wind of freedom - west wind and ruined mountains - reading Dorothy in the bathroom sunny floor liking her less feeling how maniac she must have been like J wound up to generate language charm. Chiswick! a car - at CFDC - evening sick - change room. 31 Dark blood - the embryo - looking carefully into its transparency, a red x-ray - looks like 4 hands - peering - it's not cleft, I think it's a boy - nights under the cold, stuck heavy onto pillows at times sick talking talking. Last evening talking to Cheryl - who is talking? - is it Cheryl - hard to hear - identifying is to hurl with the voice. Cutting at Cineworks - in Transit Club - telling Ellen in a wrong way - speaking in - C that there was a party - puffing and intense - the way I feel cast out, with her - in Montreal are they challenging each other - the swarm of milk on slick in steel bowl. I've been feeling a little wind of freedom, does that mean I'm on a horizon? 1 December Night wakings are to eat. This touch of remembering what it's like to be alone - then, that I'm not going to be. Sleet rain - the titles - finding to shoot them single - they're beautiful runs of force. Misery fart smell - afternoon sick - dark watery. 2 Was - Dr Batt - vitamins - Save-On clam chowder 75 cents - downpour - looking for grilled salmon - Alpha [Cine] - the White Rose [café] - Cari "Poor Ellie" - only JM [Jan-Marie Martell invited me to sit in on Dennis Burke's computer animation night class at Emily Carr with her] - the monitor is night - noodle soup - she wants to talk about abortion, it's the time to listen but I have to hold off by talk - the movie lights on brick, maple, water sparks blowing down the black - CFDW again, Pearl's gobbling and kind looks - letting babble to Cari. 3 What about plump white Skye - saying I thought she had bad taste - "They tell me that too" - she's hanging about nearby. In bed night before: it's going to come into such deadness - my house without voices battling. Knock knock knock on the stairs - J-V and friends [Jean-Vi Lenthe] - a girl like Dianna - New Zealand - going through rain to find Chinese dinner, cashews and fat shrimp, chicken singing when the lid - this aft wanting ice cream, noodles - sleeping. 4 In night sexy soft [fantasy] saying to Jam You can be my man as much as you want, we're in bed together every night, my breasts are fed, is it the vitamins - then dream a rowboat she gave me floating in the air, inviting her into my hospital bed, early morning we're undisturbed but later fills with beds, some double. Ovaltine breakfast, then cold sweat on my lip, I'd better go home fast. Heart strain, telling myself without quite feeling it I'd better sit down on the sidewalk - throwing up ham omelette not very different than it was, in spots of rain. Bent beside the bike, the Chinese passing and even the philosopher sentry don't stop - how long will I have to be here - then, relieved, I'll get on my bike and go home fast. The air cutting a deep chill into my chest. I'm going to be stop being able to see. Will I fall on the road. Getting between cars onto the sidewalk with grass blades green but the periphery closed to the spot just in front of me. Not blacking out, it's very bright, but still vision is going. Laying the bike down again and squatting with my elbow on its antler - oh I want to be in my bed. In the evening I'm in bed reading. A voice downstairs I don't make out. "It's Michael." "Hi," meaning okay come in. He's pale, he's been very sick he says, red around his eyes, hollow and decrepit. I know his plan but he can visit this time. Other winter, skating on the marsh, different kinds of trees around, they'd tear off a stem with a clubbed join to the root, trim it different ways, play hockey with a clump of frozen lichen. Late winter afternoon color in the sky. Yelling with the boys from the farm on the other hill. Or skating alone up miles of valley into the backland of unknown farms, finding the channel among arms of ice with scrub willow closing. Staggering up the hill sometimes after dark, boots after skates go flat, scarves mittens caps jackets snowy pants thrown off. I was wanting to know what was for supper, hungry, but there's nothing I can eat. 5 Monday was - staying in bed - Dorothy - reading winter 1982 - combed sexions [Jam's book] - ellie mammary - sometimes intense and rapid dying - passion come to able limit - 6 The dawn waking - always now - find what is perceiving - forehead - don't loosen it just feel the roots of the pull - the Navajo bowl silver rim quartz crystal - a marvel - I could be so-much working - every day - writing and movies - like the grade 12 year I could program myself. I think she is Môr. Cineworks cuing - the festival catalogue - devouring turkey san with gravy reading it - want to talk to T, she's out all evening, why, where - Hardly sick and then eating cures it. 7 Was it falling asleep - feeling 'China' - the pleasure of feeling - then it's gone - trying to find it - standing in the junk shop street in Hong Kong? - but it was 'Chinese,' here too - if I could - it's her. After long waking maybe when she leaves for work something relaxes and I dream I tackle T - "I know you and Rhoda came between us" - I'd never have done that to you, I stay miles away from Rhoda - she starts saying suspectingly "Have you been talking to Jam?" Some flowers J brought her - reticulata - they're the iris I gave Rhoda and took back - yes I replanted the bulbs - yelling some - now I'm mad and complaining - Rhoda comes in - "I don't want Rhoda to be here!" - she says I'm having a breakthrough and if I was that stops it - but wake with peaceful circulation in my breasts. Disrupted calling T - long ago this morning the lab - library - dew on my lip, I have to go home. Book center there she's through the window by the door, doesn't like to say hello - Daphne - the bread and cheese - with C about Sheila Kitzinger - "I'd like to be there if I could" - "I'd already thought maybe you could take pictures" - French fries and gravy The thickness of air these days - suffocating - verethane, cigarettes, the smell of secretion from my crotch, cooking grease, farts, sweat, soap - but the goodness of the freesia smelt at the door. Then after, pretty Trudy. I say what the dream said. "I have to tell Ellie!" "JAM - you and I are not going to have a ---." "You're going to have a baby!" She looks amazed. "I'm glad to have amazed you." 8 I sleep better but there's a dream of a woman under me, myself, turning upward to say - what - something like - she's slender white in a black dress - that she doesn't approve. St Paul's, the Orsinian people loving each other and speaking - sick and sleeping all aft - breathless, scarily heart-weak. Write J the simple letter crying. Your company was very dear to me. I am glad to be free of our helplessness together. Then don't want to comfort her. If Innana wishes to return / she must provide someone in her place. Erishkigal of the underworld, she has no compassion for the relationships of others, husband and wife or parent and child, she craves her own sexual satisfaction without protection or care, unloving unloved abandoned instinctive and full of rage greed and desperate loneliness. [letter]
i am not 'with' michael
9 The front room in Burghley Rd - Judy with the black man naked - then in his good (Valhalla Tony tall) suit suddenly - a fire in the fireplace - London rowhouse - things - close to with Don and the other beautiful man, brothers, I'm feeling, when I put my hand on his hand it's a moment breathless - one on either side, embracing each other around me. I'm in an emptied house looking, the girls' room, papers in the drawer, girls' books - I'm on the floor - the girl comes in - I'm saying what I do, I like to see what I can know of the lives, I tell what I know about her - she takes me downstairs - the furniture - I like it - the piano - she'll play it - not what I thought, it's music hall, very lively. Men use information as power, we use it as material to share. Margaret Mead saying the actual primal scene is the parents talking to each other in language the child doesn't know. The print dusty - tackling Dave [at Alpha Cine] - "Do you talk to everyone like that?" - then he gets gentle - liquid gate it. Chasing Dennis's Basic instruction. BC Royal curry fried rice - Jan's classy face - Harvard - with her ethnographic - warm teaching - the Canada Council defunded, media are going to be corporation controlled - is our open learning time gone. She says - a corner from physics to metaphysics - a campaign. 10 Kitchen - sleeping, late, sick demanding a lot of food - rolls, Black Forest ham, olives, French fries and zonked in the newspaper - sleep - rain, an amorous woman of the Tang, beautiful one the clear nose - swimming - Jam-jar you were a fool and I too, we didn't learn each other. 11 Her real house we weren't in a lot, pictures in a magazine, a rattan sea house, very furnished - talking impeded to her relative's wife - hesitation when I ask if they've been overseas, I tell her, whether it was a small sea or the ocean - formally "May I walk around outside" in her hearing - where I thought the edge of the sea a long way still past a silty farm - then by the glitter marsh, the last of the distance a boardwalk and a very small windowed office, two lesbians editing a paper - from this wake feeling how she began to shock me at the first, her division with her family. The house like another dream - seaside townhouses for rich people. After the movie I guess - wanting to write her a fatty letter saying You can be my man as much as you want, the condition is, you have to fuck me every night. Sunday - Anna Buchan again, now, her house the one I would stare at - her happiness - she made a coffee cake - "I'm fascinated" - warm, succeeding. 12 Black, gone, Monday - in bed without seeing it, reading Llewellyn - I come out saying to Trudy, You had to have her too, it's your nature you have to have everyone your friends have got. Llewellyn - intimacy and food. [How green was my valley] 13 They've found the criminal - I'm in bed befuddled, against the glass roof a bat? Big animal I don't remember, and then a black young gorilla, shiny leather, pressed on the glass - knocking downstairs, it's me that's found, I won't answer, stay in bed - two women, one with a gun against the second, carrying a baby, and a gun pointed at me - she puts it on the bed but then it's the other's pointed at me. Louis at Alpha, the gentle - oh being able to ask for help and change. Library, the pile, I haven't been able but today I'm going to look up morning sickness. Not long, peripheral. Maybe someone who knows me, maybe not. In dark clothes, my books have told her, she sits on the table to block the men, what was I doing, holding a blank? Or steady. Is that what the steady is. [Jam finds me in the library] The hotel settee. A few things to say and watching - "Oh comm'on you were only beginning to be willing because you could feel I was getting ready to go, as long as I was holding on you were glad to be able to be princely pushing me away" - "There's truth in that" - we're still maneuvering - she says "I'm seeing a lot of people" and I say, and feel her recoil, "I was quite frightened, there was a lump in my breast, but it went away." At the swing door before we go out separate sides - "I can't yield" - cheerfully, "I know you can't, and even if you could it wouldn't work, I'm not strong enough and you aren't either." And on the street: how has that left me. Alright though I'm sure she'll be easier. Said she'd come down on purpose to ask. 14 Morning! Why - it's sun - and not sick - going to UBC - so hungry, spending money fast, only big real platesful, cooked not by me, can keep the wolf down. Tallis and articulated shoulders raga. French stone building, colonnade, pool, stairwell. The vivid young man who when he saw me read him flashed back and smiled, and I after one tick, too - in a suit and looking like music. Wanting to dream, prime myself - 15 Yesterday also - the parrot on Broadway holding his claw to his mouth digging and chewing inside the beak's big pincers, digging with his tongue - a look of his eye rolling in old skin like the mouth of a sack, nervy, like nail-biting. And a man who makes furniture in impeccable free fantasy - that's how. And it's Sal [Potter] - "I think we're on this earth to be geniuses." 17 [Women's films at the Cinemateque] Air, nettle 1 and 2 - the intensity of silence - their attack. [two Quebec women heckle my film] Daphne just got there. Introducing Sally - Daphne's steady way of asking "In what way do we have double lives?" [Sally visiting the Western Front] De Beavoir talk talk, her machine voice and hard wrecked face. The moment I'm saying, across from Sal, "to clear a ...," my hand knocks over my glass, I catch it, " space for herself," Sal's laugh and our intimate beam - beheld. [*clipping of Sal] The Seine bridge, Notre D rotating. "to be in movement along a path" Low visibility [Patricia Gruben] the beautiful moments of darkness - the beautiful three takes on mountain road - in a hospital - the reporter, the constable, the two nurses, the crazy companion, the therapist, the psychic, the televisions - voices - the baby man who maybe killed someone - "ate the nurse" - 'cause he doesn't talk - flying through mist - Bill Bissett saying "my father, who is in spirit now" - 18 Sheila Kitzinger is the black pants - voting - huge fat Chantale's Belgian night - Marianne and Josie asking about directors I've known, these days I trade on them. The Brazilian woman! there. 19 In the East Place house - parents've left, comes to the door, tall scraggy persons, these I send away but their brothers knock next and I can't keep them all out, they'll eat everything. After a long excursion to a pool, shallow, couldn't find a deep part, can't swim only crawl, come home with the little children - was talking to Trudy, now I'm on a wagon going down the driveway hill, want her to come on, shouting across the yard, she isn't going to, I get off and walk back, she's not in the crowd following the wagon, she's not walking west across the grass field, but as I'm looking along the hillslope I see the snow shrunk to islets, tips of new green on the trees and bushes, and I'm gently diffused with seeing, I thought it would be winter for a long time yet, it's really spring. 21 Sweet Honey [in the Rock] - les mots / maux. Monday libe. Melanie Klein envy Hillman the image not the explanation.
22 The lab - why does she gas - "She gives up on her." At the sitting [I try sitting at the Zen Centre] - a so intense sickness is coming on me - Karen and Adam. C at the libe. Feher's book, the lie is that your mother loves you.
23 Morning weak and sick. Some anger at J. Should go to Banyan for 3HO book - but what catches is The yeast connection - candida.
24 A leopard at night, black leopard. The one with me thinks we're not safe, the leopard's in the sleeping loft. We'll go in the inner house where we can close the door. My hand on the switch, no light comes on, none of the other switches either. Paul runs up the tower stairs to make sure the leopard? But as I'm standing down here by the door in the dark, realizing the door won't open from inside, I hear his voice, Luke's?, calling "Here Laura, come here," the leopard. Wake in fear. Remembering the convulsions of fear on Saturna, seeing Jam's intent to harm. From there remembering in openness the having to feel the murder in my friends. I knew what I should have done in the dream - run up the stairs fast and quiet, because the door must be open there, to let the leopard in. Christianity. Wizards. A postcard densely covered on the back. [from Robert M] An Oriental child being prepared to go to the west, programmed with the whole content of the culture and at the same time made competitive, stuffed and honed.
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