| edged out 3 part 2 - 1982 july-auguat | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
23 July 1982 Pink stones by grey tree trunk. The intelligent one who looks after me wears a pretty wrap dress and thongs. Pink stone, sand color, glassed photographs collection, good oranges, kiwis, ki mo no, white plates, own room with a phone, bed and digital clock. Raspberries, blue berries, music through --- the closet. [fantasy of a housekeeper] In the rubbish a little curved knife flat and light in a thin curved scabbard - for honour - knight's knife - Mason's / the symbol's shape doesn't change but accommodates different parts the / Mason's map / on the back / knight's gown / where's blade, showing it, there wasn't a blade The Chinese woman defending the house, she'll rage with a board but now she's gone out to wash - has tied on her green sweater across her breasts in a becoming way, the baby in front, she's talking to a man, she's going to spend the night in a shelter. The knife, below it under pressed rubbish (compost box very emptied) a kimono (mouton) orange. I see a / book in the foldover at the belly, / it's a journal I hid there long before / written when I was still a child In my writing direct before (charm) a story about Karen seeing someone page back poison from a bull, that's blue (I thought female hormones are poison) that was blue during the episode In an interval waking, from dreams the sense of how I dislike being with Paul, how awful I find his voice and tone, and / what the compost digging was, for the other, whose turn to feel is when I'm asleep.
Hello stale mate
In the attic the church fathers - grandfathers - object. Couch, someone's drawing (slats, pigeons, dawn). She brings it back objecting to fierce unchristian things in it. The fathers' windows. Grey head on a presumed pillow. The attic is wide brown slatted, seems of a school? or -. Fathers use it, or room next to it. I go out and not knowing I'm going to, begin to make a speech about the artist's integrity. People gather. I talk on with the sense I am really explaining. The artist / expresses a time. There can't be corrections / the artist's integrity is in expressing exactly the quality of a time.
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My sister Emily loved the moors. Puzzling why I seem not to have the alert / judgment of how to move again) reply seemed to be yoga.
A projector with dimmer. I could automate it, in and out. How much is film time [list of notes in origin shot times] Will you be my human friend again and see whether what was made can still work. All along there was / one making another one / deciding, finding, pulling out the rule, working in silence making language / so I could as language make you back. Working a field in silence - I mean the field all of the field in its silent way works - Mor A most private joy untrusted / trusted Oh do I have time to be practical now and manage. I've been posing as the wild one, it hasn't been working, I no longer am so, but the straightforward success, I can't be, by physical eccentricity, and so have ended having to pose, and don't see through it. Shiftless. She had Leonard and such a fine training and companionship. Make use of your difference. No! Except that I may have been misjudging what the difference is. Look back at the green sweater girl. This one: what I do is suspend.
Not to say I can't experiment with the rest. So that when it is working I get the sense of being fully energized - nothing stunted. But this needs constant effort, anxiety and rush.
The work is worthless, the life has to have it. Q: is there any other way - the teachers - Berkeley - working directly on the - as she does it the art seems the most rooted - The repeated yearning - she had her own press -
Her way to working in formed worlds was made easy, reading her I'm envious and angry, reading DR I'm gratefully kissing. She wasn't hopeless socially, in money, sexually. I seem to myself to be sad and resigned in all the ways but something in work: that from the crude ignorant one, I have (by desperate trading) got to a work tact. Which is:
And is ashamed in everything else, the ordinary work it does ordinarily. Pagus the country It is her seasonal condition A plant familiar The hesitant relation. If I think of there being another, how is that. Known by theory, known as other, by theory. Dream, if dream's its speech, not understood. Mirror=nasturtium2. Only of own (face), is it not symmetrical. The slips of writing and other. That it doesn't seem to come to one, I have been trying to include my own position as part, the question is actually can I do what I want, dizziness seeing that what I wrote is other than what I thought I meant - cocoa - if it's one there are so many lost - if that one is mine, there are so many lost - if mine is one, and all the others are one, there are none lost, but at the price that I can't know other than my one in which they seem lost -
Reading Virginia, I was feeling how she coheres, by anxiety about her reputation, working to be loved, malicious, vision of everyone as defective, organization of time, sexual taboo-crossing, she isn't anxious about whether she's taking from anyone, jealousy, envy. Social playing. Fighting for skill in the arena. There is an imagination of what human should be. It seems a true conscience, possibly. If there are people the way they should be, in themselves with one another: the vision of pride - mastering jealousy, envy, competition, overarching. That is, not having to struggle barely to be one; so rich, there's no struggle. Skilled not floored. Aggressive in quest not in self protection. She'd never write stuff like this. That way of writing, a journal works: it strengthens the floor, and so what's wrong with it, it was a mesmerizing account of success, the consolidating is an old-fashioned kind but it works. It embarrasses me, I know it's wrong. The sense of skilled management is right. Without that kind of coherence: how to have the life river clear vividness. Huh? Does embarrassment erode. Embarrassment still there: not winning, then losing. Shame unchanged. Badly dressed. Going into the bank with the welfare check, the clerks will think -. Ugly. Thick body grey-faced. Without accomplishment. They turn away. Something wrong with not wanting them or being interested, the way they aren't real, I don't accept them in my time, they are not the destiny I want, or when they are, the way it makes me hysterical and anyway I turn out to have been exaggerating. Others are true loyal and making firm life stories. My life story has been somewhere abandoned. What does it mean. Everything that was abandoned, should have been kept, because it was the only? But the essence was not there - it could not be kept. What's true will stay. What has stayed. Body. Face. North country. In some way Luke. Some one untrusted in me says (you) language. The sense of form behind shifts made with language. Mistrusted energy of the magike reference / pagus countryside / walking out into. What needs firming. Was today looking for a Greek book.
From just looking into The waves the notion that a book could be just writing and written straight into a book. Monday 1st August
Language. A movement and then a stop and then a movement and a stop. Words like sowing teeth that come up like [sketch] little forts. "I cracked the first canto but I don't want to just give it to them." "It's a word that's used to adjust your version so that it can be in my world, and I've been thinking that what should happen is that everyone should be taken at their own description." From showing her reckoning of repetition in the larger and smaller parts. The girl with the doll. Walking in skirt and white high heels. The (shower room) being made into a greenhouse, after the very large greenhouse across the road (Clearbrook). Three nights back Luke saying he wants to come. They murder --- (something).
"Oh Ezra oh Ezra" on knees arms around her whole body, as had been sleeping on her side in the hall, "I got to see you again." Her tail beats the floor. Leaving from the porch platform, bow south. She bows east. I suspend not knowing what she means and we let ourselves make and feel the real parting.
Being younger better-looking hair shining and smaller waist shining cheek cut eyes headband. They say it's reflected. Does it look like that. Its shadows would tell an observer.
I was saying my religion is observation.
Concentrate has the most sense of autonomy Listen hlysnan list, lean Observe is give heed or attention to what you see The service and aggression words The aggression is the way it feels to do it, pressure. The service is - to what - that they were so long not seeing what the moon is - "In the old days they must have known about that" - was what - upstairs feet in front of electric heater - was that she felt the gaze reflected in the mirror. So what else is the moon. Going out of the town, east side, night, a white hat laid by the garbage, step aside to look, sou'ester, notice on the ground a rubber sleeping bag, enclosing a form, closed end steeply uphill, "It's a tree planter." The eastern plain open toward the farm, he might be sleeping here ready to come to see me tomorrow, the man I'm with wants me to wait there while he goes to his place west of La Glace, to get or arrange something, and then we'll drive round the night - I don't want to, for some reason, I want to go along. We both pass through, the open drawer low on towels (filing cabinet), tall thin-face older Walter, "When I run out I take from here" (M's threadbare towels), I say it's alright. We crossed Broadway into that other neighbourhood, walked looking at houses and gardens strange to us. Raspberries in the alleys. New tar I didn't want on my red suede loafers. "I never come here." With matronly wardrobe in one blue suitcase. "You went to college with one suitcase? You carried it yourself?" "Of course - it was only one suitcase and a typewriter case, and a brown purse." Gothic. The light coming out of the open Gothic door [of Ban Righ Hall]. "There was no one else there?" Going through the empty rooms until I found a rug I liked. The deep bathtubs and tearing gush of very hot water. Glaring light in white tile. "I was in agony in relation to their bodies, I was full of their bodies, I can still see them, and in the dining room when there were hundreds. I was never away from their bodies when I was with them. In my room I had to have absolute control, there had to be nothing on the dresser top, I'd have to put everything in the drawer." "It had to be external order only? Not internal?" "No inside the drawers and in the closet it didn't matter." In your letters - howling fantasies - to give life - on our latest Sunday what were we dreaming: the press, her office space, her going to Honk Kong, and I was dreaming my past. Yelling that if she goes back she must live away from home.
One past full moon. Kung fu movie. Spirit battle again, as last time there, leaving remembering. Mortal attack. To know the other wants you dead.
Listening to the talk with M, by interrupting it hearing it worse. The dugout story and details I read as showing I was an animal. 5 August This work.
Ah! When the mosquito had woken me I told myself to remember what I'd seen (been shown), the energy of the (category) Chinese (boy)(fighting) girl. Standing on the bicycle pedals shooting across three lanes. The memory isn't exact and even then I was working to find it. It was a message about what to be, that there isn't a category of female (the dancers) (I would have been). [transcription of acid tape where i burn M's photo of me:
- In a living room, large house with a circle drive, not ours, abandoned, people gathered waiting for the troopers, cataclysm. Outside at a car, J with me, he arriving at the door, to ring the doorbell, with an envelope of writing for me. "I have to ---." Cross to take it from him, just that. When I return she has gone "to find something to drink." In the house, it's more hers, the catastrophe has happened, we're after it, but I'll never see her again. Looking at her shelves in the hall, two shelves, on the top shelf the books she's written (18"), on the lower, history, economics, maybe what she's published, two very small bottles with flowers exquisitely in her way, offered, one with a blue bead tied crossing them. I'm standing in front of them crying oh-ow, oh-ow. Wake, pre-sunrise light, by emotion. Back in the time after the cataclysm, this I don't remember well, I can see only the first time, in this one it was again with people I don't know gathered in a house we don't know, things are happening again, some are going to go tree planting. Waking and sleeping, sounds from Pender or Hastings, a loudspeaker. Lying in golden daylight, in the shadow behind slats, until it's time to wake: it's 10:30. Yoga these mornings. The South African woman's evening films.
What is it that you want passed on? In the cab with E, grain truck, countryside wide, somewhere on an unknown road between Clairemont and the Wembley road, he and I silent or. Dreaming Al Morrison, passing his house looking. Edson Trail? He would have said. Liking the name and the fact of the high graded graveled trail. The sudden wonder, are you speaking for my womb. Then when I say I wish my mind were your equal who do I speak for. More vulnerable to losing herself, and she thinks it may have to do with the wiring, either a biological give-over mechanisms, as in the bible, or from M's example. She insists she's waiting, she's in the vanguard, down the line bodies will not conceive unless they want to, and when they want to, will. Y says X is slow: she means, that she is in a vanguard disbelieving what she's told about reproduction, believing that what she is, must find its company further down the line. - This is part of a story: My friend Y (uncertain thoughts about 'friend,' and what is a person) and I, were speaking on the phone for three hours, maybe, this morning. She cried and I did. She cries that she wants to mate, that is, to have a real baby, with me. I could have a baby, I could conceive, with anyone. She could conceive herself. I think it's not likely that we will find a way to do it together. She rages that I am held in believing current dogma about how reproduction works. She says she is in a vanguard, someday it will be as she believes possible. That is, no one will conceive when they don't want to, and when they want to, they will, by a psychic or a technological learning. When she says so, I feel an opening into a possible world, I'm stirred to take a step out of this world. I don't know how the move would be made. I don't know what it means. I ask her if what she means is having faith. She says that isn't it. It would be a clear heart. I think she means I'd have to want it with her, in her agony.
Pinker 22
The land is curdled at the edge onto the light
"I am not so moved now by women." [T] "Will you press against my ovaries."
Wing strokes. Individual feathers scraping the air, I can hear. What is the motor sound, it is the dark blue laid across the water.
It's cold. Oh the angle's wing stroke so advances it! [*sketch]
All of it is written in mind of you
I'd have to want it in your agony If you grow old and die there will be no one again like you in four millennia of outer space exploring. No one will be your happiness. (Is he like me? I don't know. Yes.) To propagate your happiness, write. To play mummy and daddy - ha - what I know and refuse is that - if you can get to be the daddy you'll be finally safe from having to grow up to be a woman. You are lying, it isn't your genes, if it were you'd consider doing it another way. It isn't the pure fact of mating or you'd be willing to be the mother. It is, and how can I not know it and suspect your stratagem, that you want to have daddy and mommy in such a way that you can be daddy. I would say your daddy wants you to be him and if you were a daddy, it would be Percy. How could I want to marry Percy? He's alright but he's not the one for me. Mary and Percy. Would she like him, don't think so. And where would the two of us be, Ed and Ashrafbi, they like each other better but they'd be gone. Me, Ed and Mary both, love Ashrafbi but we do not love and do not marry and do not have a child with Percy. Mary and Ashrafbi, now! Oh Mary could be someone else. You speak as if wise Ashrafbi is making the offer and will guard the two, but there is where you aren't experienced and know nothing. If you want to offer Ashrafbi you would have to be the mother. How could Mary and Ashrafbi do it. How would they. Mary and Ashrafbi and their child Jimelli. They'd equally support, each would have part-time work. (You have it wrong, it's if you were a woman that I might trust enough to do it.) They'd have a same wise sense of what care and freedom to offer. They wouldn't have to be enemy and ally. They'd run a press, push each other to write truer, neither would be as they became. Mary would be taller and would move less scuttling, Ashrafbi would not have lost her eye. When you die for lack of being a father, who dies. It's Percy. Somehow, I don't know how, you have been indwelt by him, you love her from in him, when you love a woman. It must be. The other one who loves me is the little monkey child. Your mother doesn't love me, there it is. Where would she be when Percy moves in, I'd never see her face again. and who is it who's happy - it's not him, it's her. Ergo - the child you want, is her. Percy is willing to die but wants her not to. Something like that. And who do I want to send on. Who have I sent on - him, more than her, but him blended so he isn't a lost misery. ("But you MUST educate him.") Who would I want to send on - myself, myself down all the millennia in outer space, myself with longer arms and legs and in both sexes. Would there be an advantage to mixing with either Percy or Ashrafbi? Maybe there are fine bodies to be unpacked out of her, for the rest, her sanity, I have it already. Him - crankiness and business. Business is there from Peter Konrad. Your happiness that I agree should go on and branch and multiply and pervade - oh yes I love your happiness, it should be passed ahead - who did you get it from and who will you be when you've given it ahead, will you still be it wherever it is (and me stuck with Percy). Dorothy's happiness is passed on, it made it through. She knew it was it, not her genes, she wanted to pass, and she did it. You see. Doris Lessing wanted to pass on her analytic. Her books do it, her son is a wimp. She wouldn't give it to him, she wanted women to have it. Tell me about your daughter. Is it really a girl. the window where I sat facing the bay of Cape Dorset, and I began to notice the light more. And I noticed certain kinds of radiance around the edges of objects. And I began to see the primary colors, the breakdown, which I'd never noticed before, but which seemed obvious in the situation of the light there. I found the image in the light on paper. The first ones were very tentatively done. I loved what was emerging, but they were sometimes just a single figure, in a room or in a landscape. And very often the figure would be pointing, pointing to the next drawing, in a way. In the next drawing I'd try to find out what she was pointing at. So they led me along, and they gradually got more complex, with landscape winding around, and animals, and all kinds of weather. They were the only things I've done in my life that actually happened to me. Only the drawings I've made show the history of this kind of experience, this drawing. some earlier drawings into chalk surface They are about a kind of contact I've made inside myself, which seemed to be connected with something outside. It seemed to be a kind of union with certain things .... It's as though I've brought together all the things I really like, in the form of drawing. Joyce Wieland [not sure where - predates Lund's Joyce Wieland: artist on fire] 9 T's polaroids. "Mother-blood." do not conceptually separate space and time Their concept of space is not one of static enclosure but as direction, in movement tima here/now A case system for spatial position More by sound than sight. Let's hear what we can see. 'read' through their buttocks, the wave pattern created by the interplay of wind and swell wed themselves to nature, for nature's forms, they believe, lie hidden until humans reveal them one by one All words are a form of the verb to be which itself is lacking. Each word accomplished, is as quickly lost. Releases. Having a strong heart, to be brave to release. Sila which means both thought and outside Thought is the product of outside, but like it, brings into being. Sila goddess of the natural order is also the goddess of thought. The successful hunter is her conscious self. regard the eye as both transmitter and receiver A stare, even a glance, may penetrate another, instilling there, some alien spirit force. Children must be protected even from dolls. Reversal everywhere associated with death. We believe that people can live a life apart from real life. private songs passed on from partner to partner which help with hunting, avoid accidents at sea, and alter winds and tides. Many of these songs are in a language unknown to the Eskimo.
seen the legendary inugun "or hiding man" in cariboo antlers "The old men who could teach me are dead." The Arctic slope, snow after mid-September
the source "the world out there" and the feeling of awe which he experiences in its company had to reach into the water first, and feel the face of the seal he had snared before hauling it onto the ice. If it had long hair and its face felt human the hunter would release the creature at once, if he failed he would die. They called it inuk, a person. Television set in the corridor (like the TV set at Joe's) spitting static volley. (We both thought bad rays and wanted to flee. He stood with his deep chest covering the set when he wanted to try it again.) Is it saying the border war with D is a radiation of static, or only playing with what impressed it - when I was shouting to her through the door about it - the set was turned with the back forward - I could tune it so the static came out of the picture side - she said she was using the back for (to plug in, I thought) a camera - she opened the door showing a whole party of couth people. From a hospital with Luke and Garth (I think) from the upper bunk smiling into his eyes. Brown length of hair. He's the size of Gaulish? Celtish people, a singer. Piles of stuff left on the bed. Pink nightdress. We're out the door onto a broad lawn and from there across the city through houses balcony's backyards always stopped always finding, forcing, a way. It's the hospital we're looking to go back to. We've lost Garth but at least Luke is still with me. Come out on a fenced terrace high above, at last, a road. It's like North London or the Holloway Road from a flyover. Poor, littered, grimed, fast, deadly and we are still high above it. I'm saying to a woman like a secretary "How do you get down to take the bus?" She says we don't, and there are no buses anymore. Looking at the chains below, could they be climbed down, could Luke do it. And then how far would it be, is there in fact any way, should we give up, now, getting back, and travel on from here? But if we have a central home, Luke and I would be able to find each other if we were separated. Going through the houses, balconies, yards, we were always in someone's private space, sometimes passing, just missing, thinking to steal from (children's wool many-colored caps), evading, the white trellises cutting us off, I leading, I crashed them, Luke and I could step through then, to the man. "That's itchy work!" And getting by in a hurry. Nunassiaq the beautiful land Language conglomerates
Those by the sea have many taboos as if they have not lived there long. Water! mek merim merit merik They would dress in their newest and best clothes and sit staring over land and sea. Helpers - make mental journeys to find. When they reveal, must touch them. miuk If he does it clumsily they say he has lied that day. In séance language shadow is human, ripening is arriving. friends parting to see how big the world is Has an ancient highly elaborate form of the language. takreoot one who turns things into spirits
orôrg avane The unshielded q luglik patiq Akjârtoq was an old woman when Aijuk, they say, after his death, they say, his song, by Paulinâq dreamt quarrtsilumi the time of waiting for something to break
Song presented in two sections, two songs with nothing to do with each other talilgak a forgotten man's song about the winds hek Qivsarina's song about Aitaq dreamed by Heq He never called her by name, but always "my little sister".
"I have been born further forward (in other times)." Morning bed.
The rhetorical territory "You want to be a very fine swimmer in it and I really am a water creature." Inflation In the kitchen this morning not so much looking, like to put arms around her legs. Dorothy's devotion. "One sees the limits of it." "Whereas he made each word crumble under one. It corresponded to something they were feeling in other ways." Moony and peaceful this day after.
being satisfied with the registering time in another one "When I see a good-looking face looking at me with love I have no spine, it turns me to jelly." [J] Hand up under the covers holding the lotus foot. Both hand and foot are swarming. Turned a few facets in his face, near his mouth. That we had word about the end of Opa and Oma's apartment life Friday 13th / 12th seemed to agree / wept in parting / and today a letter from R. A gentle generous genius in and about. Gender and writing and value She read what she had written before I came in. I found my fingers pressed over my mouth and my eyes howling. She understood, she said in quite a cheerful kind voice "Don't cry, you can do it too." (It's not the first time) I scream that nobody's interested in Dorothy Richardson, no one can see what she did. I mean that I refuse to try to publish because the writing that's most valued is not at all like what I want to do. What I want to do resembles writing that is mediumly valued, or, highly valued by people of medium value.
"That was a complete scuttle." She shows layers "Well in that earlier writing I could see more this time than I could the first time I read it. The first time it was as if there wasn't any space around the words." "But there's a different kind of space. But it is creating another kind of space." About DR that her accomplishment is imaginative, there's more of a tradition.
"My fantasy is that there is a stance I could find, that I have briefly found, which is different from the one most people are in, where -. It's as if one of the things people do is project a past and future around (a person or thing). That's the novelistic. That's what novels were learning to do. There's a projection of space and time behind and ahead. It's like standing in a wide space. The other is like standing in a river, everything comes toward you, it is as meanings, it's like being in a dream awake, it's reading it as if it's a dream, it's meanings, color, it's connected to color; the other is space. What most people do most of the time is not the projection either,; they are like catching pebbles and throwing them back, it's in very shallow space, they're catching pebbles that come out of nowhere from four inches in front of them." "That's quite a nice image." This lying together on the bed and after it she asked me to make myself small and lie against her chest. I was like a large tapeworm coiled up and weighting your (was saying her and my hand began yo-) chest and then it was right. "I do miss their size. I miss the being smaller than. I miss the shoulders and the big hands." "... and everything that -." Why don't I remember the phrases! I don't hear the voice. The way I couldn't resist, going to Lucy's, and then at the bus, she told me how it would be and I waited till the last second to grin off. Star on the bus step. The driver said "Come on!" And when she came home I said Ezra was not so obedient; and, wagged. Contemplative / devotional
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