8 July 1982
- Trapline is steel silver blue-green tension. They're forced
to be alone. I was full of their tension. My neck ached after.
-
This morning Sunday early waking from a small voice my own stating opposites
to what I'm used to thinking.
Working pleasure but then together with and now more, pain, quarrel.
I have been long slave in apprehension jealousy envy lowliness bitterness
poverty.
Dropping J. T keeps near.
Work - in the blue journal remembering, a few days remarkably recovering
and then summoning the liquefied thinking from then.
- Hello myself is that how it is now.
- Wanted to talk about J, don't want it written down.
-
- Oh where should I be.
- She won't will it strongly enough to get me back.
-
- If I watch thought and language-like times in the same way as world
things (as in front of me and not accompanying) I will see that they come
from somewhere else; images may be true perception.
- : not knowing the status of imagination
What can imagination do.
In the quiet of evening I was first to concentrate
on stillness, desire the fulfillment of my need, and thirdly to imagine
it fulfilled.
In order to enter the stillness it is necessary
to raise one's intelligence to a higher degree of consciousness. When achieved
it is a lucid work of intense activity which clarifies the desire and creates
efficiency. Mine is never a case of possession. I am the secretary.
-
What I'd got to with Roy.
- 1. the keeping back far enough to have the whole exchange in sight,
speaking from that
- 2. refusing to register anxiety
- 3. bold saying
Before that from young
- 1. they're talking falsely, stay out of it
With them
- 1. watch thought for true information and trust it
- 2. see their experience
- 3. whatever is, is it
- 2. work through, don't note
With J
- 1. doubt, can it work to be fierce personally, ingratiating publicly:
the idea of diplomatic skill, that it erodes person more to be publicly
distained, that it fixes into lowliness, that to be mobile and operating
the other is a posture other than helpless vacancy.
I've been betting on sincerity or the image of it and am in doubt whether
it's still true or working. Now here's something - the beautiful soul.
Any phrase contains the coordinates of its place - that's not quite.
She said "That writing is the cube, that fissures and still
stands together."
The first summer. The question is, is there still an outside.
The slides show: a staring school alone in the land. A staring truck
to the eyes in grass. A view from further back than the door. a view from
behind a shadow flying. A view of veined sky, in the shadow. The photographer
veiled to show only what she sees. A bone and its shadow in ashed ground
and water. Flame rearing to see itself in the mirror.
The second summer. Was dumb and in paradise and in pain.
Thank you. Window zooming up. Hey. But not - it's her beautiful
head. It's white delight.
Rain pour. Thumps, from where, wall bounced, from the west sky. Walking
out toward it. Yellow lightning shakes from further back than the towers.
It looked and sounded like Beirut. I stood against a lamp post at the natural
height of land.
Came home. Cocoa at the stove, boiled over (for you my old one) while
I stood under the porch light looking. It is and it isn't. What do I know
today. The blinding fine white yellow headlights rising on the slick. That
the first version is one and true, the revised is false, anxious, opportunistic,
narrow, and that there can be a version come from them both. I told her
on the bench in the $2.75 dinner place. Orange sweater, in it body feels
thin ribs but doesn't look it, and pink pants. The bomber jacket if I turn
the ragged cuffs in under the sleeve. Why am I explaining to the future,
I used to, and am.
Working with many of my ages.
She said she was wanting cigarettes. The young poet.
The only one awake. It was the paper boy's bicycle.
"It came true." Stones in a furrow.
-
Is elephant the placenta! From the cord.
Female grove of the Sara tribe. One round pot on another. In front of
it a mother and child.
A bush fire. An elephant placenta / mother and child.
Delight thinking of god as placenta. Religion the safety of accomplished
worship of fertility within the father worship. The placenta is part of
- the one becomes two, within one / which is one within one / the mirror
reflection is again placenta.
I feel a homecoming light.
The reenacting.
That there is a true worship going on.
- One becomes two, within one
- One emerges from one into one
- Of the two, one is born, one is gone
After birth seeing the placenta, the surprise of, the gnarled, heavily
veined big hefty meaty. I thought of it as my organ. The afterbirth lets
go. Red and blue bulging.
Am I going to begin to understand my work! it seems.
They hold up the placenta so the child can see it (for second sight).
Place. Local writing and pictures.
-
Eye accustom
- Using a light to look into a part
Development
The slightest indications
If it begins with collapse and return of light in the printer
- Here an image comes
- visible as eyes accustom
First part bleached green a ghost is visiting
the homestead
A spirit battle with a father
Summer red and black children
a mouse
The kindled image feels the smallest flare
They slide through the exposures
A liminal beating wheatfield
The grass came toward me in waves
- fluctuating running changes
- fluid force 'currents and straight lines'
A night piece
- What is night, and how is it produced
- Through the transparent darkness poured
-
- I have the impression looking at the material
- that a child cooperated in its making
a little light
a little light
- put it somewhere in the body
- move it around
the light is attention
-
- The milk tree
- The mother is a tree
- Hathor dendrites
-
- Which dies so we may live
- The marsh landscape
- "Below the ground she is imagined no longer as the cow, but as
the tree whose fruits are cast into the ground for the renewal of life"
-
- Embodied in a rigorous and delicate structure
- Cosmological
- Veining
- Silting
- Coagulating
- Granulating
- Axis
In movies, the detail of flux, which is to say, flux.
Stilling to get through the perceived to what perceives
- One has to go from level to level of the awareness
- To follow the breath is a sure help
It's already live and already bright, picks up tiny lines of vibration.
It registers exquisitely the smallest breathing shift of your thigh as fluctuation
of brightness.
- the erotic of landscape flare
the kindled
- image feels the smallest
flare
-
- Each time it begins with pulling into here
-
- Strengthening a way of speaking and sensing
-
- melting and moving
- forward and back
- coming to rest
-
- the matrix it goes into and what it does there - cohering in a way
the good mind can delight to find
-
- little swarm or glimmer to hold eye to detail
-
- an expanding region of undertone
-
- -
If we were parting for life it would be like this, smile, but blind,
and already gone, would it. You're going through war to your family. We
know there'll be no turning around. You don't know what's happening, not
at all, you know nothing of what it was and is, six big white translucent
eggs piled on raw chicken in a tissue plastic bag, six green apples in brown
paper. Mallow flowers and two daisies, a check. Having no idea that this
is not when I need money. Or what you did. You're being noble. Leaning cheek
on bathtub edge, "I don't want there to be anyone else in me. I want
to be alone in this work."
-
The blue lines. Close. Then rotates to a distance enough to see ghosts.
-
What was this day. The first line feeling from thunder to scent. Stretching
twining music.
Clean clothes red necklace.
Finish it look up.
WAS THAT him? the face quickly checking back and forth. Might not have
been. No he's more humor and sweetness. Was.
It puts me into thin stirred time to think so.
Satisfied to say this way. Like you.
The strength and color of the light and air.
Mountain sides white breath stands among.
I was writing, looked up and saw the live fire of the yellow raincoat
hung on the balustrade post at the west window. The first sun. In the puzzle
of what this day's intention was, I sang at it, thinking it wouldn't work
that way, crudely, but singing whatever it would be, invitation, prefigure
or acknowledgement of the fire of the raincoat.
To you: that I can't know you well enough to believe I merit to be with
you.
21
That is my fantasy. The whole actual is a foreign continent. Your fantasy,
susceptibility, our daughter's eyelashes, bring it to you, and you'll share
a house with, and this time I won't be there, maybe then the true part will
be all that's left.
I am away talking to myself, she knows none of me, the writing she's
got my rhythm in, without ever having loved or seen it! She's referring
to our future, from fantasy, from her notion, knowing nothing about how
I hear it.
In bed: that this time not saying is return to a kind of time when I'm
bright and inward and that it's (for) work.
Head pressures brightening
I wrote on
Sailing sailing sayling away
Sail on through the sad it has gone on
Nasturtiums
Môrr of the field
- born at noon, laid on the ground
- burned in the Campo dei Fiori
22
Frenzy's already here, I'm tearing through the leaves Ophruoeis!
yelling No more husband I want
music now
- long neon dusks our elbows
on window sills
- we're looking down on streets
- the moon's curve is pointing
- the grey dust pink blue
- pink gathering and will be more intense
- yellow gathering
- môr what color is the sky?
-
- to be a moth or bird in that color
which is here too among the roofs
A projector with dimmer.
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 -
-
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.
- what's the other -
- one who has begun - I have - in that this one is different
-
- and again the same
The work is worthless, the life has to have it.
The repeated yearning - she had her own press -
- London for mind, the country for real. Money from where.
- Reading anywhere, camera is love.
-
- moon is the image of and that no one saw it was
- that it shows the terminator where at this dusk we are
- it's white in color grey
goosewing cloud
-
- Oh where's my Leonard. He put down the proofs in tears.
- Her way to working in formed worlds was made easy, reading her I'm
envious and angry
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:
- paper scraps, their slightness of connection
- phrases, their unusualness of slightness of connection
- the slides
- with J, something raw
- the something that can make these and nothing else
And is ashamed in everything else, the ordinary work it does ordinarily.
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.
-
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.
- The memory of a sense of attack
- Thought of it as a realm
- (The last battle of the Sky Bandit, blue silk)
- Do I have to be there not to be in oblivion
- Is it on the way, is it where the others stop.
-
- "What is it in you that you want passed on?"
- "Sometimes when I am alone I am quite happy."
- "Yes that should be passed on."
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.
-
This is part of a story:
My friend (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.
- "My womb is interested." "I can feel that."
- "My womb is listening."
-
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.
-
"I have been born further forward (in other times). Morning bed.
- The letters and journals from that time seem dizzy. Dyzig foolish,
stupid.
- Ungrounded.
- (She) seems posed in inferiority.
- And then she as if straightens up.
-
"When I see a good-looking face looking at me with love I have no
spine, it turns me to jelly." [J]
-
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.
"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.
"Olson says that, that you should stay away from connecting it to
the world."
"Don't believe him."
"I didn't, but that's what you're saying too, and somebody I read
said the reason Dorothy Richardson was less important than Joyce or Woolf
was that she wouldn't cut loose from --- --- --- ---."
"Yes." (She understands it right away! She agrees!)
"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."
-
[Robert's letter]
- "I'm not sure I'm qualified to respond to you."
- "I fluctuate."
- "Maybe I can meander a little around your edges"
- Working. "They are draft poems."
- The prenate thoughtful touching
20 August
[sketch of first edge of the new moon]
Those days at the green table writing, hot day is unlived except maybe
as the drive. Evening's great shining. I have just seen that I've put flowers
on the west windowsill, that are like puja, orange pink yellow purple red
offered to orange pink yellow purple red, as the two strips of color pinned
next to the frame (the tack is dead moon). I move chair table and writing
here when the light comes around. Oh color what do you want from me and
how will I do it. The stinking end of the period. I'll write down calmly,
how sharply I look at figures walking across the top of the alley. Bach.
Last night on the other side of the street the walker with a suitcase, traveler
from Hastings. Then I recognize the suitcase and T waves. I am fascinated/laughing
staring at Rhoda by her table still unaware that Trudy is coming up the
stairs. I see her start up.
T can't stop peering at writing. "Tell me what you want to know
and I'll tell you it." She's twitching to know what's up. "Cher
Roberr?" Not with you, grinning and thinking, what don't I know about
what's wanted in the whole.
That R had a letter from Barry and was, by it, inspired to want to write
an essay on language describing how Stein keeps on careful because much
less insulated till finally it comes out. Her reserve tanks.
- "Poor thready veins of the Something Else!"
- "Well I was just making it up as I went along - ."
- What did I lose, knew something.
Realizing the gentle generous of how he speaks out between the lines.
Is it less beautiful to hear oneself and say it out in simple lines as I
want to.
I wrote passionately about the huge free impartial (disinterested) body
of English.
And kept writing, all the more, but with much less certainty, because
I was in the unknown, and nothing I said was true: it was part of a trace
of a passage, at best. Otherwise it was an instrument of dominance politics,
sexual self-advertisement, distraction and cover, maneuver.
Dictionary. Its structure of inclusion.
The movement from one meaning to another is an exquisite shift I feel
spatially.
I liked the image of working from inside rock to open perspectives. That
is exactly how it feels. A prenate thoughtful touching of directions thinning
out the solidity of distances in just some spots.
And about stretching the flute's tone so that afterwards it falls home
- it's something I've done blindly, miserably overreach, starve for success,
and take the incidental arrivals as natural.
The sense of opening perspectives by attenuating solidity, wondering
whether the directions opened are arms toward you / her / them. And a multiple
mind being excavated. That with wondering less fancily whether you are a
self I'm just coming to see 'outside,' and whether Jung when he says guardian
of the threshold might mean a meeting with a physical person. Moving carefully
to get to be able to tell you what needs telling to you.
Floods the womb with catecholamines. It's jolted into fear.
Implicit - that the life is first, first find the way into a life with
honest relations - then write so that what's written is what it is, description
precise, fantasy precise as fantasy - if working with glamours, of form
also, know them, have traced them - genres are impossible, structuring concerns
having to do with the history of the genre, are death; reference is death
- dislike for some voices, understand the politics of voice preference -
looking before saying, language units, phrases, have already got a world
implicit - taking care to see what the plausibility comes from - surge -
hunger to describe what happens - riding rhythm - the way metaphor can relieve
without risk - physical light of deep (fertility/religion) images -
- Having split of hand from voice - splits, parallels
- Spatial shift in logical relation
- Spatial shift in voice range
- Pure pleasure of word
- Phrase that does what it says
That if something grips it is real, but not to stop there or assume
Knowledge of what literary pleasure is
There has always got to be more precision and accuracy than one knows
reason for, because another range of consciousness can get understanding
from what I can't now see, the whole is worthless otherwise - familiarity
even in one work makes affection - there's no possibility of getting it
all but if the few traces are accurate the rest will be accurately implied
- the whole of what's implied by a phrase feel and what's done with it -
watch out for memory believing and approving what it has heard before.
[Here I set down the rest of charm, value, ethic, tactic and gender, in writing.]
Reading, scanning through to the rules someone's writing by, I think
it's not done in language, I think it's done from a hovering behind, it
is like 'noting' (Etymology - "What is it behind / or in this word
that's making me like it.")
Feeling the rules I write by, those I refer to now, and those I remember
struggling in, as undiscussed, a space of charges, a suspension, the familiar
unspoken: suspension. Could I precipitate them into lines.
The rules are the hardest I can bear. That's done without any sense of
tactic. They're made as ethical/technical absolutes. Other writers are considered
by them.
Others' work and formulation is used as a terminal. The other terminal
is the strength of my self-formation so far. I work on something with a
pull from the terminals.
- Whenever a metaphor comes up
- start again.
Learning to write alone or toward the quickest reader.
- thinking by an emotional indication.
- placing something : like
an outer sign.
"Writing within the hologram already formed"
Sense of earnest looking to understand somewhere in the elements. When
the confident tightrope dancers just work on off the end of accomplished
range.
The discipline in English sentences, making everything connect to something
else. It can be there because it's lovely, attractive, brings the feeling
of charm, but it must seem to be there as information about how something
is done.
At any time to be willing to let go.
An embodiment of values and responsiveness
"Built by the extremely delicate decisions of conscience."
Woke with it.
Judging the political, erotic, experience and integrity - how far they've
gone in the life - how they get money, how they mate, how they speak to
anyone, how they write a note.
Sunday. Koji's with T. Long waterfront road to the Bayshore corner. Stanley
Park. The plumed light.
Rewriting a letter, thinking not to send it.
"If you could write what you know about that, there'd never have
been anything like it."
22
The way writing's been no longer the whole processing of something. It's
been an interrupted trace put down without thought of itself so that what's
left to be totaled is
What's lost is the sense of the meaning of
"There should be a laying on of hands for everyone, once a day."
The quality of the little light hands.
In these days being light in light few clothes, white pink and red. The
image from jumping off the bicycle beside plate glass. Morning narrow waist.
Cloud of hair again. Alone, compact. Next to T, wide spread and walking
badly. Don't like to look. "You wanted to be perfect."
On bicycle riding up behind a man on roller skates. He was flying down
the center of the road swaying his lunch bag, throwing one leg after the
other, sideways, swaying his body between them. I rode up near to look in
his face. He said sorry. I could see a nectarine in his plastic bag.
I was riding in the black dress. He hadn't done up the boot laces. Then
I wheeled around to pick blackberries on the tracks.
J called from setting up the ladder. "I was in a time warp when
you called."
hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come
up in the night after the first fall of rain
26
- I'd like to make a movie of what's experienced before birth.
- The release of seeing genesis illumined.
- Seeing metaphor illumined.
Raise hell between us
something
- "And you know what made them do it was curiosity.
- They wanted to see what was inside."
-
- "They wanted to see someone looking at her inside."
- "Yes that's it."
Going further upstream.
My body wants to kill me incide
That I wouldn't have a baby with her. That I would no longer let
her touch me. The mother has to know it, no one else can know it at that
age. The mother has to be there to know it, otherwise it is lost.
I as if bow in front of our finding the way to each other.
Then the sounds in bed, she dazed dressing in the closet.
Bowed over panting with crying. I said to stay still and take longer
breaths. Sit in front of her holding her knees and breathing so that afterwards
I feel a swarming. I watch without certainty, having to doubt whether for
instance it is giving out or taking in. She is sitting collapsed holding
her hands over her sex. Little child. The pain at the tip and in the chest.
"I see it cut off."
A piece of meat like a slice of chicken heart being flung at an obelisk.
It's in a (cellar) room with rounded ceiling, Tibet. A light, candle near
the floor on the left. Stones on the floor. Man with an earring. Man/statue
(sandstone). Stones with the tops flattened as if to hold something.
Am I the anchor in this world and she on the end of the cord. Her visionary
gift, she can go find things.
Let them see it. The child born with open eyes.
Uncertain, without belief, tired, not seeing well: ie not loving. Distanced.
Knowing I couldn't see well and was giving her only partly right guidance.
There is also a feeling that whatever I do will not be right/wrong, will
simply further the world of that act.
When she came - it was not the one to speak to, but - the one with the
same identity - the timing is right but it will have to be done across the
strangeness - the inflation nervousness is of hearing being-right.
Last night hand on the thin chest between the beginnings of the breasts.
The small grieved dazed one. Smal grievd dazd one smal head weighted with
glass. Swollen. Alien.
In the two days yelling the second day's weakness. "It's beginning
to close." The marvel of what can be said. The marvel of how much is
not understood. The great understanding. The seen oblivion. Desperation.
The feeling (my) way through. Listening. Battling. Giving way. Taking a
dicey firm stand. Seeing large noble intelligence - mystified argument -
the fight - last ditch - threatening to die - I am racked not knowing whether
I'll ever have that again, not wanting to lose you, it's alright now, I
can bear it if I have my work but I don't like to look ahead - how can you
bear it.
The one who has no description - the true one - the one who makes me
strange.
Seeing noble intelligence - mystified argument - working her as if I know
- pity for the lying hope - the largest admiration - a vacuity of strangeness
- the certain arrivals together - suddenly diving under her argument to
see where it's wrong in its base - what we made together is what we've made.
Suddenly diving under her argument - coming near to the present and leaving
it.
The body of English
She is seeing her present memory for the last time.
- To see what is seen
- To find what is dreaming
- To stand on the Arctic shore
- To love Luke
The shouting is small and at a distance
27
Woke with bars of knowledge arriving.
New joining of parts that were already very near - the whole mesh is
offering me its new phrases - Luke's letter coming as if the new joins aren't
only in the notes.
Already looking to see how it could be beyond the bridging work, with
those - the sentence - subordinate clauses I don't want
The guardians of the threshold; beyond is work
The space book!
Speaking to you - these answers are coming to me for questions that aren't
yours
-
Sense of what this would be as the end of a preoccupation, the end of
a body of preoccupation.
30
Myself in the porch bed thinking I could learn to move with that melting
out, to be gone before him. Most satin warm-skinned muscle body, thigh skin.
I can touch it all. She doesn't love to touch my skin. My big double root
I can feel now. that I can imagine just the surfaces I want, palms touching
quickly everywhere, the wide thing just in the ring and I'm sucking with
my mouth inside my mouth.
What I don't want is the whole heavy logic of the real body, what I can
have is the touch like a drawing, put my thighs up in weightlessness. That
our mechanism is to be hooked on wanting to find what we've had already,
and to be loosed into this life by remembering having had it.
The fat emperor knees apart tiny fingers pompous eunuch scribble. It
means fear.
-
He's violent, she doesn't protect, is she violent too, I will give up
my allure, my leg is her man, to be safe from the father and safe with her.
Years stubbornly looking to know what is glamour, what is gender, what
is dream and image, what is alternative to these.
What is geometry in relation to these.
"I dreamed I was lying under the sea. Then I realized I wasn't lying
under the sea, I was what's under the sea."
"It does mean there's one material of things and thoughts."
Or one sort of form in two materials.
1st September
The children aren't in school. The New Pacific this morning and
put up on the wall. Go out in clean clothes, buy half pound of ling cod,
88 cents, onions, tomatoes, pears, watermelon. Phoning College Printers
and about the projector. Coming up the steps with the bag in arm. Footsteps
behind. Laugh to see. Instant: the Japanese jacket, good head, better. "Why
did you say hm." "It was the echo." She leaves the bag on
the window sill. I am laying the fish in three pieces onto the hot bacon
fat and garlic, surface whitens and opaques. She's in the chair at the window.
She is getting familiarly into my bed! Under the pink blanket, sandals
in the door frame.
I find there is rice left, wash it, foaming talc, three rinses.
For two sheets eight page tabloid it's $344.
Once again see the blind girl sleeping I'll never know, but hands her
glasses to be put somewhere.
I can stare, round eyelid, she can feel the stare, I'll stop. It's unendable
strangeness. No one would look less strange.
Having a beautiful pot to take from the oven. "There's rice!"
"I know." "Did you hear me washing it?" "I heard
it hit the pot." Sssss. I heard the brush.
"It's very accomplished. It's your preference. There's quite a lot
of joy in it."
"Would you like something else, tea?" Breaks - "I'm delighted
you like it."
-
Embryology books. The horrible images of dead babies, 'atlases' of a
particular dead-looking tissue cross section.
I am upstream in an unaccountably sealed off fresh source. There's a
sensation, but thin, of having made the crossing. Thin as in memory, and
already past the pour of spontaneous ordering. Yesterday lay down in the
afternoon, slept till 9:30, today in the bus could hardly bear the dragging
so long in its toxic shell, need to eat, not struggling against personalities,
but easily exhausted, need long stretches of robot reading, newspaper, Omni.
Yesterday sent a letter, am expecting and not, the foam on the floor,
or nothing, it's my concentrated event, that is the moment that will or
won't exist.
3rd
Wanting you to get by not imagining me intimate - put her head near my
shoulder, the soft side of her jaw, I could love you up - what was it about
her four pages - ! you're jealous and not willing to put it out straight
- can I take the challenge, like a plunge, I'll show, "They said something
I needed someone to tell me" - looking remote - "What are you
thinking?" - "Drifted away" - ! you won't let yourself feel
it - we stare - the cut of her mouth - her fine proud face, I can look like
that too - like pride but blank behind - the sense I should go home, there's
nothing we can do - that it would be right to go - directly and quietly
- we'd admire.
(Was full moon.)
4th
To myself in this weekend the question was why don't I love her, I'm
not seeing her. The loud wrangling that has sometimes been followed by mind.
Exhaustion and willessness swell bruised brain. A tendency to act helpless,
to appeal. Eloquent statement brings tears.
"We'll both go on for the rest of our lives committed to those limits."
I set out the balanced demands but I hold something back, she brings
me to say part of it but I don't get out of her the part she's holding.
What I hold prevents me seeing.
"You secreted part of yourself with her." "Yes I didn't
trust you."
- Today, saying it to T. "Your speaking to me about this today."
- "It's essential, that kind of talk." "You always have
it." "Yes." "I don't understand why she doesn't want
to. It makes me unsure of myself."
5th
Labour Day. Garden setting stones, clearing. Heavy one. About do I want
to pick blueberries. Blueberry house acre and road. The dyke and far out
marsh and Strait. The dead flat green reach to shades of blue. Far off at
the water edge bird, flock, the way it ribbons up, I say ah! as she
does, both at one spot on the horizon. The cattails tall flipt. Swallows
fold fall ta dup ta dup ta-a. At the marge a heavier bird, a great
business bird, whose wings labour and bend. Dropping down rust clover heads
dandelion silver a little poplar with two yellow leaves in the hearts two
birds veer not together but knowing where the other.
Fireweed pink the marsh spike, blue-purple aster into among the reeds,
cattails disrupt, spill out, long way. That light. A solid silver line.
Out of blue blue blue white white lights the land we saw it is. The marches.
The tiny white sails. The far shore. The estuary flat original flat beyond.
"Because it's blue and green." And the big sky.
- Money - realized that I don't consume any of it, it is spoken of as
consumed, in fact it's immediately passed on. What is consumed - small
amount of plant stuff, some metal, petroleum, other peoples' time.
- Ratio of giving out and holding in or wasting.
- Planetary economics. The distance from its view to working system.
The fight with Roy, about keeping and making and communicating accurate
records.
"Everyone's story is different!" To C in gladness.
10th
Waking at J's that the religion's language so openly campaigned for the
fathers and that it was never seen as that. Our congregation gathered singing
about the father and son. The singing beautiful.
- If beauty is from (the womb) the prenatal time
- If it as such is presocial, preideological
- If in the combat life it's used, can be used, by anyone who can use
it, to charm anyone who doesn't know it
20
- Had in a tampax to get the last stinking blood, taking it out, ripped
dry. Still hurts. Afternoon that having to lie down of this late summer.
Sleeping a little, waking in that physical peace. This is a rare time without
agony, but the hunger for junk, goes on to eating at peoples' and reading
Omni and so now it's over.
24
- Didn't write that she said "If I don't have you the house is nothing
and going to Hong Kong is nothing and the group is nothing" and I
knew it was true.
What happened. Tuesday in the affection and safe position saying I'll
keep in touch, helping getting money, having work and family life, coming
to the door confidently, thinking maybe I'd wrench down the rest of the
plaster. What meets me is shock. It's no longer - . "Sometimes you
like it, how am I supposed to know." "I've had two days of peace
and as soon as I see you I crack." She seems in a berserk. Ordering
me to sit down. Hiding behind a door. (Whose shock was it.) Staying still
out the window, one eye peering up under my arm. "I'm upstairs writing
beautiful things about us." I'm cracking up laughing hysterically,
she's peering. "What are you doing?" "I'm cracking up."
"Good."
Weds - junk day.
Thurs - by aft call her with growl. "NOT NOW" says the cold
one. I hang up. I call back. "If not now then ...." She cuts me
off to go upstairs. At the phone beside the laundry yelling distraught.
She offers an appointment. "I'll see you in November you bloody doctor."
Using the impetus to go for my boots, and the way she runs up and watches.
I fling the key and am out the door like a judo fling. She holds the door
and shuts it behind me. It's about five. I have a sense of being disposed
of. When she says "Do you want to stay for one statement," that's
it, that's the knee I fly over out the door. It is my speed she uses.
I leave when there's nothing else I can do. I expel myself rather than
have you do it. I leave in bitterness and bravado and try to use the schwung
to work.
27
I suddenly wondered what would happen if I saw that I could never get
what I want, but that it wasn't personal, it was the law of movement of
the universe, to head for C if you want to get to B. 'Sideways stepping.'
Then what would I do differently, do I still want or do the wheels stop.
Then the journey. [we go to Clearbrook to see my Grandparents, who have
moved into the Menno Home] In the car love coming into hands mouth and breasts.
Blue jean leg. The black and brown glossy again. Is it as the dream, when
he's gone she'll be able?
Coming joyful comical through the dining room balanced looking seen seeing
moving light weighted public appearance until from one moment to the next
I see her and him with her, two same curves over their plates, Sunday clothes,
a large table of small others. Chocolate brownies. I get down by her without
any speech, delighted. "Ehhh-llee?" Put my head along her arm
to say the whole adventure of her being there and our coming to find her,
and his being beside her and the coming of the gesture. Then she takes it
neatly: "Geht, wartet in meinem Zimmer."
The moment at the glass door, I had my hand on her shoulder, I realized
it'd been questing sexually over the woman shoulder-knob.
On the Sunday morning the waking was I'm in your (tone). It takes all
day fighting for me to remember being in it. Then I go home and have it
in my writing in my journal. It's nothing to do with what you argue or your
issue, it's like an atmosphere.
-
On the Sunday morning the waking was I'm in your (tone). It takes all
day fighting for me to remember being in it. Then I go home and have it
in my writing in my journal. It's nothing to do with what you argue or your
issue, it's like an atmosphere.
-
To future: the house on 6th, its front steps, the room upstairs, floor
mattress, pink quilt. She sleeps spread across her own bed. I am lying next
to her as she falls asleep, beginning to see moving visions. Hungry girl
too hungry for me. "I want to ask you, is my kissing improving?"
Swelled real slippery girl thing. The one kissing's thirteen.
"You don't trust your reader." "What reader do you trust?"
"A larger myself watching a smaller myself."
8 October
He seems to me to be dropping into a portly jovial type [Paul K] - when
I first knew him he had a lighter moon-boy look, not public figure object
collector. The greed was there, he was already ingratiating. Why though
T complains and gossips, don't I mind: because she's physically someway
clean. And now C, who also seems to have dropped her discernment. Robert
whose oblivions don't quite matter because he's scrupulous.
What I think is pulling you down, is that you're afraid of pain and don't
know how to use its clarity, and instead dodge into some little comfort,
and then are committed to those little comforts and fantasies.
-
Dear being. Heart cry. Yes but not literature. Why is heart crying. There
is a usual way to name it. Is there a new way. What would make it stop crying.
-
This morning her penetrable form. "I feel I'm transparent to you
and you can see all the small changes." I mean when I touched it I
had the sensation of pressing into a layer, three centimeters of love. what
I said knowing only I would understand it was "You feel lovely."
9
Then what was that delicate seeing, already I can't resee it. Who is
there when I'm not. I am the shell of it. I want to see it. It was moved
by the basement.
Two days gripped by working in the basement, the first a silver daylight
in the garden, when it burst clear after rain, that I saw through the door
and from the sidewalk carrying things through in that powerful continuity
of working. The dream job sorting things. Diana's father being buried, I'm
building her a shelf and taking her trunks and boxes down onto it. Upstairs
running footsteps, girls' voices, furniture being moved, like a Saturday
morning preparing for a wedding.
Dawn moved far into the south.
One gull rowing through.
Higher than the sun ever goes, have I ever seen it there, the white [waning
half] almost straight up.
The single gulls crossing to different places, unlike evening when their
lines go parallel.
12
[Visiting my Konrad grandfather when he nearly died.] At the hospital
bed I'm standing holding his hand. He begins to say what I fear will be
religious exhortation. "That is not up to me. Something I want to say
to you ." I'm looking, he can see I'm not following, he's shaking his
head and laughing. I was so worried he was going to force me, but it was
another spirit I wouldn't have had to be afraid of. (She said "It made
NO SENSE at all.) Was he saying I should think of marrying, and then was
he saying or maybe not.
17
Afternoon. Clearbrook. A gardening day. She tells me her theory of another
kind of patriarchy as function, I can't stand it, think it's her madness,
am repelled; go to telling the Clearbrook story, its imprint, it seems,
in the pressed ankles rigid trunk and arms. J is making me in her way writhe
and loathe myself, as I'm ready to, she's angry I don't imagine being touched,
I'm repelled, the way she massages, she says and I feel, the Konrad flesh,
I didn't guard myself by any difference in the time with them, now I'm ashamed,
loathing is in participation, "Your righteousness feeds on their lasciviousness
the way their - ."
This morning she puts on the leather coat she is most ugly in, straps,
buckles, short flared skirt. I can't look. "I won't have tea because
I want to get away from the atmosphere of last night as soon as possible."
"Me too!" She is blaming me! She's freaked. I said what she feels
is fertility, like anyone; she said I was as vulgar as, in the same way
as, my folks. Both our madnesses. This morning what she was fleeing was
what I said. "Fathering is a con, there's no such thing, I don't understand
how you can want what you want." Small amount of wine has brought us
to stupid brawling, bared us right to the questionable base ugly fantasy.
The trade off is, a constantly recaving fantasy base, and the high joy of
joined focus. That's strange. Queasy.
T in the brown jacket sitting in the brown wicker chair, girl look, I
can see that what she really is in, is painting. "You really like it."
"I'm hooked."
"I was in an anxiety state looking for books." "I know
about that." "Writing and painting."
She looked from her window at the roofer climbing up to look into my
rooms. "He was studying it."
Thinking of painting I begin to see.
The golf course willows heavily wet. The spruces' beautiful shape. Birds
seem tossed up out of them. Trees turned up undersilver their feelings.
From the bus seeing the trees excited.
When I've described this work to anyone but J, M, who else, T?, I've
had an inner drawing or holding back, that I don't have with myself, as
if I'm lying or fantasizing. I don't know whether it's their skepticism
or my own. If I describe it in sentences, outside.
Yet it's fertile. It's my fertility speaking. It, if I bring it to any
reading, that Addison, Dante, it sets me into a so dense incredulous knowing,
it richens any matter so much, that I stop.
17
In the garden, cold, under the sumac, roofers' debris laid down in fall
leaves. Telling Leah this summer's research. Sky says "Mom is this
like an eclipse?" "It's an eclipse of the clouds, Sky." I
say "It is like an eclipse," not understanding how completely
they've spoken, then hear what all of us have said. We are all silent. I
see the washline pole's grey nap.
20
Sweep, begin in the kitchen, Gzowski's voice, keep sweeping all the rooms.
Then downhill, bicycle kid, apples and oranges, cold air, yellow streets
month, garden the roofers raked, sumac part stripped red, come driving into
the grassing court, rope the bike onto the fence. Nine o'clock Leah. (Heard
a car.) Back room work. Green notebook, look for local country notes, what
I find is descriptions of life before birth. That's all I was collecting,
I'm taking out separately anything that seems to come from something else.
Ie having left it, the country I left is that, it compiled structure.
Place is first of all
What is the show
- 1. story of finding
- 2. told so it fine tunes
As it went, transferring from one notebook into another, it begins, I
don't see what they are, take them as they were, attractions, and then when
I see one as that reference, I begin page after page to see where they fit,
some of the compilation tells me more, locates the question.
Learning to recognize the feel of anything prebirth. The equations, conversions,
the math I could read from how, if I've solved them, the clues are distorted.
The love I had for knowing that geometry is from the experience of growth.
The way it's looking like a closed system. A fright as if by following
'myself' without resistance as I have been doing, the method and material
found in the same way without feeling 'will', I have found my way into a
closed universe, not one that as I want goes on spaciously - immediate answer
was the lever or will is here, the carat of extra pressure in the attention
making the sentence.
Next was - look at the fright to see what specifically my own - the closed
system goes back where it comes.
Where to work now.
And when that is cleared aside what's left.
Take it to the edge of the next one if possible.
1. delight and fascination 2. suspicion and reading
Equivalencies of orders earth prenatal sexual cosmological consciousness.
What did I see. If I see the metaphor can I feel back through to -
If in my present mind I can extrapolate to simulate, the mind in the
water, I could see the design. From any two points, establish.
Then having seen it, what. I want to be beyond the computation though
I can see only the possibility and don't know whether I could do it, beyond
the computation is again having been born, and in a world. And so.
If I just keep situating myself in the moment of having been born (talking
to T, I saw that dope - )
Seeing a certain kind of thought, is always - is that, anxious thought.
The slant of her head toward R. The way I was listening to what she would
say, more personally. She's not willing to hear anything of mine. And now
did she recognize her pleasure in having hurt me. I want to know why after
yesterday afternoon seeing and being sorry for not reading the emperor as
what she's doing to herself. "Chaos." Was tears, she was stroking
her legs, I saw to stroke her back, she cried. And about Hong Kong being
able to say it in words for her. Then in public the oddness of what we'd
say to each other. "Everyone else has a better time than we do."
"But it made you very pretty." I could feel her wanting to show
me dominated. The evening. Discomfort seeing her social. Our false relation
visible to ourselves.
I am finding out what it is from here, but not yet, what anything is,
from it. That's my doubt.
I've read the code but I'm not more alert. I'm being harsh to C and Paul,
amn't more compassionate.
Dichotomies and questions indicate what parts
of an understanding are locked out or garbled.
27
A sense of having laboured in the two ways. In fascination and then to
track it. And to learn to see to write.
Question is what's the relation of this coming-through to the new attention.
She offered garden work and 'the newspaper' when she thought I had agreed
to have a baby with her. I was revolted by the quality of that thankfulness.
Why. She would ignore the quality, she'd give anything.
It isn't that she wants to have a baby. (Do I.) She wants me to have
a baby so she can be it. Talk about having a baby dilates me (you won't
think it through) and fires me up, I would be glad to, and I'd like one
that would be like her and me,
Oh the slide of Luke newborn, that I'd never seen the pain of. Now I
want to just pick him up and hold him.
I've been seduced ignorant. But more than most, and call it being an
artist. What is the proportion. Does having come through to knowing what
glamour is,
But I see she doesn't care for me or prefer me. I know who she prefers.
She has a bargain friend. Oh let's quit.
I want to start again. I couldn't have what I wanted and got what I could
get and it was at times better than. What is worse about her is her lie
and the hatred it puts her in.
28
How to remember to really go on alone.
29
Seeing mastery. Granting it. Accepting agony. Returning to the beginning
of accepting agony without protest.
- First I have to understand my own writing.
- First I have to be able to stand in any meeting with curiosity and
knowledge not shame.
31st
- [Jam says she won't come to my show and then I suddenly cancel it]
-
- "I think I won't come," was a flash in the lower belly, not
an emotion, a stab. Gunpowder flash. Then - what I think it is. She's making
it right, wants to cancel the first fall. I wanted her to hear what I can
do. "Do you really not know why?" "No I really don't."
It could be you're saying: you won't give me a baby, I won't see your single
baby born. We'll leave it there. I was in a thrill of clarity, but knew
we could be mistaking each other in the original way.
-
- Then standing by the stove eating salad calculating. Now I'm almost
blank. Where does it take me.
-
- I said it (has she never said it), they believed it, though I said
it to effect something, didn't know what, and have been feeling what it
might be. Face is fired now. She took it as done, though she said go home
and think. The shape of the whole.
-
- The parts only she could see.
- It will mean no one else can.
-
- That she took it as done. almost over. Opened. What does it open. The
actual open world where I choose as I go and it is according.
-
- Hello. Is it over. Am I alone. Am I not going to be a person anymore.
Is it not going to melt through again.
-
- Exhausted. How this day was. On the phone they're saying "I was
looking forward to it."
-
- In this writing down there's no indicator for when one mind is quoting
another. All anxious.
- Yesterday and before the intensity in attention to time. It is a state
- today I've been thinking about it wanting to know whether it sees or
not - the pressure and her stab out of ruthlessness, I was open to maybe,
the cassette of Pribram, having on it what I've never understood, the coding
of an angle of a line, watching whether there was a magic time in effect,
putting the show together, or in another way pushing it from one understanding
to another. Had an image of the many parts, the mass of parts, as angled
lines, that's a painting, which if I could push through in that intensity,
would be aligned so an outstanding knowledge would be there, across categories.
The material seemed about to crystallize beyond myself, I was reading through
it already suddenly more beyond myself, discarding and adding. That it
was a time in which there might be choice. I might take the step and be
out in the dimensions.
-
-
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