| edged out 4 part 2 - 1982 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
22 November 1982 T with J. Fear pain. R looks unhappy too. I don't want to play. Oh neck aching. Keep looking till 4:30. Dark. Why do I forget that every communication is in the present. Monday. It's agony without release all day, garden bricks and stones, Freud saying you're nothing but unsuccessfully wanting to love. No money no coffee no food. This morning putting up Jane's face with the red line of mourning across, hooked from Luke. six to nine months old I was in a perambulator. Quite close to me were two horses; one, a chestnut, is looking at me very hard and in a way full of meaning. This is the most vivid experience; I had the feeling that it is a human being. one year old. Father and I are in the town-park, where a park-keeper is putting a little bird into my hand. Its eyes look into mine. Among soldiers. The boy's broad shoulders. ("You throw away the towel.") Are we waiting for the war. A bus unexpectedly hovers unexpectedly. She/I grab it as it's lifting off. An island town, hot bright palms large pink flowers on bushes rotating below as we fly low over the streets ("Gibraltar"). We have crossed from one to the other side of the island, we fly on over the sea, I'm sitting in a strut outside the windshield comfortable but holding one tight brown sweater under my right arm, wondering about my left shoe. We fly a long time and I don't notice until we're coming down in, that we're overland and it's white, snow, tents open and immaculately steaming, medical tents, we've come down among the impeccable rebels. She defected on impulse, not knowing that it was defection, but she was right to come, these are fine people. Women and children among them crowding for news of the (15th) fighting force lost the day before. I go back with one of the young men (brother). We've landed the bus, are going to try for parts in the garage, we have to dissimulate and then we'll go back there. The old wheelbarrow with stones for the garden. Straining poor person, lame old woman on the street. "She doesn't love me." She loves them, the pretty body ones, the light hearted ones who other people love too. She didn't love my spirit, she never loved me, we never loved each other, she loved her fantasy that she could be a man with a woman, she didn't care for me, she didn't take care of me, she loves them, somehow, because she loves their spirit, I don't know why she doesn't. - This is all quotation. I am not able to make anyone love me, I did make her love me but it was a trick, I had to work, she couldn't just love my spirit, they, love each other's spirits, we wanted to love each other because we couldn't love those who would love our spirits (but I do love your spirit), (I don't love that you want to be better than me and don't admit it), they can go on because they love each other's spirits. We have to break apart because we don't love each other's spirits, the agony is our punishment for trying to have what we can't have. Endurance endurance endurance endurance. The you gets quite abstract in this pain. It is more now than before. I slam the door. I want to say I dream suicide. Who's wanting me to die (she will come over -). It would have to be poison or the sea. I would get ready. I'd put my things all in this room. I'd first send Luke a birthday present. I'd send Luke a birthday present, I'd accidentally drownd, I'd poison my mouse.
Those pieces of a dream only subsequently remembered The symptoms are nothing else than the person's sexual activity. Grade twelve starvation and grief and stealing - December.
What's the craziness of winter, she doesn't love me, no balance. She isn't going to come back. Leaving Frank - leaving England - them. 23 Second of November day of the dead, cross quarter days. T says "She doesn't look good. She's big." Maybe she's drinking. Mysteries. That freak about whether I lied about coming. That she didn't freak about Robert. Going off C. The baby complaint. I've been neglecting mysteries. 24
Working forward as if into the frontal lobes The image is not a stream though he says so, more like a plant. The life goes ahead into stems, that can be cut off, then it goes through other stems. Assuming a free space best context shape. Mastery of "this volume of libido" "Puts it out through us like leaves" Put together The theory of attention, the adding of the other's attention 'attachments' 'withdrawal from attachments' - they're like wires Pain is in general the expression of increased tension. A strong egotism is a protection against disease but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill. Working over - conversion, reaction formation, defense formation
He says three irreducible polarities: self/world, pleasure/pain, passive/active (attentive/assertive) Which are thought of as polar, why. Because of birth. Loving "the relation of the ego to its sources of pleasure" He begins the story after birth. If I begin it at conception, what difference to the account, ie what is the self/other of that time. He says there is no self/other until the time of hunger and spute [?] but there are attacks. There's not hunger but there's distress, anoxia, noise, emotion. The self/other distinction from pain you can get away from or not. That's not so, until much later. Then he goes to introjection and projection, intro to what's pleasure, extro to what's pain. I don't understand this. Repression. Doesn't hinder the instinct presentation from continuing to exist, from organizing further, putting out derivatives, instituting connections. "Ramifies like a fungus in the dark," "takes extreme forms." If they're far enough from the image of the real want, they are in consciousness. There can be the same want-image both with a halt on it and in another form, as idealization. Joking - a temporary lift into pleasure of what would be stuck. The concept of unconscious and repression are under the sign of birth and prebirth. Anxiety can keep out the idea, but not the pain: then it's incomplete. a fear of a wolf rather than a claim for love from the father Or feeling it goes into a strength of denial meant to keep one from acting, but comes back again as self reproach, fear of community. What is unconscious is not feeling but the 'idea presentation'. Feeling is a discharge inside self, action, outside. Anxiety is substitute for all, any, lied-about feeling. He says: the unc first 'kernel' wish-impulses, coordinate, side by side, without contradiction, they don't fight they compromise. No negating, no doubting, only more or less strength. Intensity is mobile Relations between ideas: displace one to another, "surrender the whole volume" - condense into one, the whole of several. Timeless "bear no relation to time at all" Ruthless "fate depends on their strength and how they are in relation to pleasure and pain" The system Unconscious is living and capable of development and maintains relations with C. All the paths from perception to unconscious story open, only those back out. The optical. The unc of one person can operate on that of another. "Special perfection" of work done in times when Unc falls into line with what's intended by ego, "the repression is removed for the occasion." She has been coming out and I haven't been able to handle. Ie if the brutality is inevitable. It seems true my Unbewusst is crazed wanting to be pregnant. Her way of loving as boy to mom, and there is a resistance to the other/fright. My way of loving as female narcissism / and a resistance to being it / being angry. Neurosis that derives from unanswered questions: obsessive speculating. In child, not being able to confess is because it's really about being in love. A masturbation fantasy discontinued will go underground / hysterical symptoms. The sexual setting the prototype. The unconscious 1915, Traumdeutung 1900 Schizophrenics the particular relation to language - transfer by similarity of words not similarity of things The conscious idea is the concrete idea and the verbal idea, while the unconscious is the thing-idea without the word idea. Then repression is the denial of words to a thing-idea. have to content themselves with words in the place of things Suicide - Probably no one finds energy to kill self unless it is at the same time killing someone identified with, and turning against self a murder wished on another. Each one offers a suppression of some life energy to the possible coexistence - except for those who don't, 'heroes' - some sexual interest can be sublimated - possibly, for most, not - 'culture' from the so-called perverse parts of the original pleasure making. All who wish to get to a higher complexity than their made-up allows go neurotic. He says masturbation puts one into a childishness, sets a helpless prototype. Stretching my arms when T does. F says its opposite of embrace. Hysterical blindness. They're not blind in the unconscious. 'A dissociation.' falls ill trying to be part of reality, because the inner complexity is too great. Having children is really the infant expression of wanting to love. Justin won. an individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love - in the conditions he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it which perpetually repeats itself Of these feelings which determine the capacity to love only a part has undergone full psychical development. The other part has been held up, withheld from conscious personality, may expend itself only in fantasy, or may stay buried in the unconscious each new person coming on the scene both parts of the libido will participate expectant and in readiness in those who have not adequate gratification it is as though some make believe had been interrupted by a real emergency not to succumb to the illusion that the treatment is really at an end I would state as a fundamental principle that the patient's desire and longing are to be allowed to remain, to serve as driving forces for the work and for the changes to be wrought, and one must beware of granting this source of strength some discharge by surrogates indeed it could only be surrogate, for until the repressions are lifted she is not capable of satisfaction. succeeded in what all struggle for, to reproduce in real life what she ought only to remember He must face the transference love boldly but treat it like something unreal, a condition that must be gone through during the treatment and traced back. Let it be seen he is proof against every temptation. She will then feel safe enough to allow all her conditions for loving, all the fantasies of her sexual desires, all the individual details of her way of being in love to come to light, and then will herself open up the way back from them to the infantile roots of her love. By what signs can the genuineness of a love be recognized by its power to achieve results the transference love, one has the impression that one could achieve anything by its means he has evoked this love (it would be the same thing as to conjure up a spirit from the underworld by means of a spell and then to dispatch him back again without a question). The greater the resistance the more will action repetition substitute for recollecting. sets up a perpetual struggle to keep all the impulse he wants to take into action, in his mind, to divert into the work of recollection any impulses he'd like to carry into action: prevent the repetition actions, make use only of the intentions. The transference thus forms a kind of intermediary realm between illness and real life, through which the journey from the one to the other must be made. One must allow time to get to know the resistance, after it is named. I cannot bear to be gazed at for eight hours a day. There has to be absolute honesty, nothing left out. Everything connected with the situation of the moment represents a transference to the physician which proves useful for resistance. A dependable transference first aim is attaching him to the treatment and the person of the physician. To do this, only allow him time, devote serious interest in him, clear away carefully the first resistances and avoid certain mistakes. The physician becomes linked with one of the imagos of those persons from whom he was used to receive kindness. Forfeit by taking any standpoint other than understand - for instance moralizing. One must be careful not to communicate the meaning of a symptom or wish until they're close upon it. It is not the knowledge itself, it is the working-through the resistances. The connection between the thought and the point where the forgotten is somehow imprisoned, is lacking. Saying it too soon, arouses the resistances, but when they resistances are worked through The motive is suffering, the means are knowledge of how, the energy is given by the transference, The patient uses instruction only as far as induced by the transference, so hold explanations until the transference is established. Discussion with the devil. The art is allowing one's opponent a voice, giving the means of expression. The horned god of instinctual brought to consciousness. Freed from animus possession by uniting as a woman, relating to it with feminine feeling. Such tales arose in a moment of integration in a gifted teller. One has to enter discussion with unc and to promise life in future will be conducted on new lines. At first the suggestions will seem unreliable, but then get to a new solution. A fish skin garment means someone who inhabits the unc. [Transcribed from talking to Jam about the unconscious: There does seem to be some kind of an organizing that thinks of it as impractical to know, and it goes on knowing but it goes on knowing only in a certain way and not in another way. It has specifically to do with prohibition, with training, specifically to do with sex and aggression. If puts you in a rather swampy land of not knowing whose is which. There are behaviors in me that don't belong to the verbal and the intellectual and that have quite a healthy life. - If the part that thinks it wants and the part that gropes towards it do not happen in the right sequence then it is possible for something to leak in, something alien. Perhaps it should be just - the best working relationship - what combination of connections makes the best partnership. Making it exciting for both of them to be together at all. The picture I have is not binary it's circuitous, it runs through many stations. There are going to be many stations that are not under surveillance. When you close your eyes the transform of images which I take to be a direct picture of light being transformed into neural impulses and I think that happens continuously and that's more my model.] - My-country work - don't understand cutting out - I tackle it by censoring some of the minds, then later I recover them, suspect the contempt, which pushes to get done and simplified. Complicated by other's views, which I ignore and consider, the work's job not single. Could I separate it out. Devouring and notes. What it is eating. - By Aristotelian I mean encouraging a naked confrontation between mind and object with soul left out. It's possible we share soul with objects. I revise by magnets, see what holds on. Projection: I am not orderly inside: the poem is. The male side of Marie-Louise von Franz has come very close to her. You feel in her prose that she's projecting very little. But some. We cannot have all the exiled material returned. There is some Puritanism, that is, dislike of childhood, in him. How to bring infantile pleasure into a Chinese "They imagine adulthood as the ability to balance" tik and tok, attention and aggression. When you launch out of patriarchy into the unknown the first thing that happens is the powerful attraction of babyness. moved for a thousand years into balancing mist and master ('Discipline') We go a little way from the patriarchal and start to curve down. Energizing an object Or, he says of surrealism, "Psychic energy has remained inside the psyche and there it created a new substance." Psyche is a state of great energy Moving with its own immense energy it becomes equal to the world Instead of depending on the outer world for support, it begins somehow to create a third world. as if a human being and a badger together would give birth to an angel as if a bull woke up one day with so much energy he ignored the fence posts and barn door of his pasture and created Assyria instead I don't want to make any statement on that. If I do, in this rapid tone, I'd make it with my thinking function. Durer appears with his great femininity, his combination of femininity and precision. [Ekbert Faas 1976 An interview with Robert Bly] 27 Sweet dreams of travel - the first writing of a day - frail look - feel of it - up to now didn't know I was that - frail - frail. Frale frehl frail (ailing) Lillian Alling "She wants me to fail." - Hey. Kenner. Young sprout. Wealthy head's spring between neck and brow, young one, prince's oblivion guarded, I know, sincerity is not, impressive, to the Chinese prince girl, who hangs by alertness equal to, salty water, immobile. Salty. Thin flesh chest there you're touchable crying old one, amah. Oh. Gone. "She realized she had to go." A spring connects what I say to what I don't want to know. I seem to be losing the knowledge of what the suspension and loss are. Who. I. Who. We did cry together for it. You're ashamed I'm talking about it. Is there something I've overlooked, is it all taken care of. I'm afraid we'll go on committed to our limits. "Go and think about it." Do you think I had a reason. Is there a difference between refusing what can and can't be done. Setting into the line of true statement whatever we said that was no it is not so Setting out into unreality whatever we said in the personal hope: that is choosing the personal hope away. The repeated. Having to be repeated. Newborn days. We are at work. Is there work. Is there work. We want to know. Without our contact, is it essential. If it turns out it is, then we'll know, when will we know. After a year. They're still struggling to formulate, with an immense paraphernalia. "Like coming into a familiar bloodstream, nearly my own." DR quoted in Bogan. The night through in American anxiety, 'poetry'. Why did you leave me. Why had you left me. Why didn't you want to read. It's very dark. Sunday. The rain from one shingle to the next: I was interesting for you! Why wasn't it the right kind. I thought of light on dark, the whole shingle scale is wet light,
I forget to keep attention complete. I know I'm good for you! When I am in considering a thing to describe is when I'm mediumistic - what I want to know - what does it mean that attention looks at one thing to get a message about another - mediumistic in that tiny way - especially when that message may be one I could have had direct, it is ordinary enough - is it a developed doubling - more than earlier days of having an 'outer' life - in which the fine shade came as an angling of a word - I'm occupied in something commonplace - let's see if that's true. What do I want - I don't want it to be a marginal life - I don't want to be a stupid spirit - Bogan and Woolf, the taking position in a nation, mainly - being responsible for - energetic opinion - tearing through their lives and with Bogan hating and not reading any of the 'work' - what's the blindness - it's taking primary relation to a craft - writing isn't a craft. Primary is ?? That Ellie is (what does this commit me to) in Ellie's time, and I'm the one behind and out through her. Primary is ??? With it is knowledge. Yes I'm the one in and from the dark and different light. The social is the mixed trouble, the natural is the [sketch diagram] What do I want. To work in the primary ??? Without considering nation. Be able to see the marks with what antagonist, and how to know whether it's - that's really the question - how to know what - But I know the answer - the rules I make - by the rules I do make - my But that J could read - that Daphne could read - if anyone can read better - then I have to demand and get that reading from them. - What the relation is between the north and the 'north' - anything and its dreme. OE dream joy. Living in color. Optics. a little bit deliberative in his statements rather than accidental or inadvertent or caught or embarrassed or funny or surrealist on account of that's the way the mind is, you know, putting things together fast. She was interested in the present consciousness during composition. Transcriptive. Sunday 28 Back to the beginning, I think. "I'd like to be that person but I don't think I am." "On one level it's true that we don't know how to talk to each other, but there's another level where it's simpler, it's just knowing whether someone wants to be with you or not." "I wouldn't have left her if she hadn't already left me." "The two of you working in the garden, the respect she had for you." "She was at Carole's." "Did she visit Rhoda?" "It wasn't the same day." Al's records, her slides. Sandy is going to Hong Kong for three weeks. "I have no doubt they'll be in each other's lives until they die. They go back so long." My hand flapped. "I know we are profoundly connected and I think she'll be in me forever but that doesn't mean we'll ever see each other again." "Do you think I'm imagining there'll be somebody else with whom it won't be impossible! I don't imagine that at all." Did I earn a hug. From the beginning: what to do. If there's going to be writing what do I want from it (she doesn't go through this). There is something to make clear. That's my community work - for the moment, to check it through. Always mind work - it's all day - on 'experience.' Want to make pictures b/w / color, relation, simply, screen, ink?, red over. Find a way to make prints. - Context, talk. Language / telling. I think he is the closest reader I have." exfoliating this extraordinary extending world. "Used to locate the ---" reader, etc. The wall breaks open in a beautiful way when there can't be assumptions about it. The will to purity really bores him Intensive and diverse Coherence is just for the concentration of the mind while writing Get three or four people you like very much, open the rest so anyone thinks they can get in. You work back and forth between naked self examination and reference to a tradition you respect. In Buddhist terms the body is form, the mind has the potential for formlessness Speech and language he says mediate There are poems that move in esoteric traditions within the shamanistic special world of practice. Tries to - full architecture of consciousness from contentless ground through the unc and c and "so through to sense perception and immediate emotion to scientific theory and pure mathematics." It's on the level of visualizing and revisualizing and reexperiencing and projecting the images and then writing some of the images down and keeping the lot in mind. parataxis in which the words and images are set down in the order of their occurrence in nature, not in the order of discourse. The syllable and its prelogical elements, as intuited by the poet's ear, a physiolinguistic empathy. I keep worrying that I have not yet given account of something What I did not at all like [as a householder] was its wanting to break down the high demands of mutuality. My own poetry was going so much for a higher and higher demand for an arete. He pours forth God's voices, often with address to a sponsor a presence of a poet that would be comparable to falling in love I want that energetic talking - the seminar. Whitman as having melodic intelligence. Talking about line as vine growing. Confidence, "the freedom of a created, that can do anything in a poem." In my sense of it there is nothing trivial, so that everything has to have depth since it relates throughout. What we can do is recognize. "The most important contribution Olson made is that he studies poetry almost at the medical level" - was really studying embryonic development - said understanding of man had to proceed from that. Magic would mean you are not dealing only with some archetypes in your psyche but with some real entities like angels. Poets use symbols to be initial and in a universe, Jung uses them to be a psyche and around a center. "I think that everything we see is posited in the material world." Dream was evidence that you had a primary conscious activity of composition. "If it is truly unconscious, then there are no images." Otherness. Consciousness imagines what is in it. In that, it is creating. We do not have an otherness that is imagining. I'm in a hospital, go down, help myself to food. A hotel hospital. When I'm having company in the afternoon they set a tea table. In a room of lesbian feminists they're talking about something, some kind of people, one of them dressed - how - jabs her finer, she means me as one of them, on account of thin leg. They are letting me see how they think of it - of me and of it - they're saying I'm with them unhonestly as a failed woman - femme. A hospital among Chinese people, an outbuilding with worse food for the Chinese speaking who don't know. - I call the unconscious the Other. All the other others are integrated. They form some kind of texture. The subject doesn't give me a poem, the beginning of a line does. [He is] dependent upon an adequate relation to his one subject which is recharging his sense of being alive by the panic of something he is killing and which is suffering pain. Superstitions in my poems. Idiosyncratic configurations. When I write by hand a pitch equilibration like somebody adjusting a horizontal. The content of the poem is demonstrably the working out of certain rhymes. The sound level. Pound who once wrote me about the tone leading of the vowels. If we take the vowel and take the tone lead from that There are several bold decisions one could make at any time, by which one could give an entirely different significance to everything that is going on in there. The universe created itself and the process of creation is actually going on. past is actually the thing we keep posing as if it came after the primordial which it can't possibly have done. So we are always emerging in the primordial. Our original harmonies don't disappear as being present, but they are copresent with all the other elements and we have to be attentive throughout. engagement in language only as long as we are finding the universe I think the name comes along with the focus. in love with and curious about and searching of the universe ceasing to be in language is letting go of everything around you When I say, a woman comes into the room, I see one come into the room. She is immediately present and I'm not going to pretend she isn't. The absorption in things The rejection of the unconscious that is in Zen comes through two millennia of struggle against participation mystique. Traversing the --- to the point of a sudden turning about at the "deepest seat of consciousness." Only gather information about our relation to nature, never about nature as separate from the observer, there the dichotomies fade. [Was this Olson? Someone else in his group?] - Separation book Until you've seen through your man/baby madness and no longer blame. Until I'm alone long enough to have learned to write with nothing from you.
On her table is it the piece she intends for tomorrow quoting a loving thing I said - using my dictionary form - not very well - camel - she loves me, she's imagining reading this at the dinner? - that I just want to work on having a baby again with him. Coming in, Ezra hardly greeting, lying down, going upstairs, taking the books out of the suitcase where they're almost the only (the first) things packed. Am going to set down to write "I'm sorry, I have to have these books, you can get them at ---." The door opening, the greeting to Ezra. What I'll do, I have my anger programming. She was greasy patronizing, I mustn't let her have anything, I must absolutely cut her, the way she spoke to me, I have to be the one to hold out against her insanity, I have to cut her off in every way. Here are these letters, they're yours (I hope you read them one day and finally understand), you can burn them if you want. I've come downstairs. It's a minute before she recognizes me. Here's your mettle and social pretence, see if you like it. "Excuse me, I'll give you your keys. I think this is yours. I have to take these books, I'll tell you where you can get them. This one you might be able to get here. This one is hard, the Steiner bookshop in London, it isn't called the Steiner bookshop, what's it called." She's saying it's alright. I know it has taken the floor out of her dream, the connection she wants as she wants it, not admitting. I should just be supporting her with love, being her friend, knowing she's stripped - but she won't know - she never will realize that what she's contemptuous of is what makes it possible for her to be fine and rare - they can be loving her - she'll love them - they'll be her friends on and on, I'll be alone with no one because my hardness will keep me from them too. If I supported her - I did - she turned it - if I support her now in the end she would gratefully love me - she doesn't know when she is supported, she turns on it, like last night - contempt - she is with a servant - she keeps her admiration for pride - last night I was crying and telling - she got contemptuous. She says it's alright. I say quite stupefied I know it's hard to get. "Why do you need them?" "Because I'm not finished with them." Hear the outburst, make a sound to say I know how that sounded, I'll go back to the act. "Oh, I'm not going to be sending you that writing, I'll publish it myself." "Of course." "If I still like it in a while." "You aren't going to visit?" As if there'd been no -. I anticipated this, she'd invite me to stay, to get me to change position with her again. (There are things she has to realize before -.) I didn't know she'd be so cleared today. "You look better today." "So do you." I'm with the door open and won't let her have it. "I know," and pull the door closed and turn and walk down and I hear the door open again behind and keep going. Am on the bus exhausted, the charge gone, headache, wilted. Now will I let pride, must I let pride, must I let pride stiffen it with everything, to keep resolve and be away from her forever. Publishing those on my own, is it anything, isn't it just a false step making around it a sense of its falseness. I had to get her for how she let herself treat me last night. Rage today. That's all. Still don't know about tomorrow. That's the story of today's passion it seems. I've slept the night with Andy, it isn't until noon I think to look for Luke, orange peels flung down to show rage, boys say he was seen with a gang, has he left, go into streets, questioning the boys who said they saw him with a big strong woman with a moustache, she had broad shoulders, did she have a limp, she was dragging him by the hand. Trying to scribble their strange names, phone numbers, they give me address numbers, for the phone number the name of the father, Ted, people on the case, springing up with new information. Someone says South Burnaby. That's it! The (commune). Rush through the streets, downhill down this street at the foot the gates, boys standing, where's --? She's in there but she's very sick, she's got him in there. Throw open the door, the old woman, ninety, lying in bed, Luke, in tears, dark-ringed eyes, sweeping. I rush down in weeping Luke oh Luke, arms around him, he's been her sexual slave, his little finger 4". What is preventing me feeling her - I can see face and body from memory - the minutes it is moving in full bliss - that's arrival - amazed it's just - I can look for what I need in the roundness next to the nipple - it stops too soon - that prevents - we keep needing more - that touch I can touch on the part in the scalp - why I can't find it then - keeping a distance - we'd better not sell out. 7/8 A place between tall red-pink-orange stems of 'bamboo' and small bushes? I'm scribing a circle. It's as if in the lower pasture (east). We're guessing the length, readjusting to get it round. I locate near the top, that is, in the trees, scribing, scratching, and it is right as we've marked it out. (I was perhaps the arm of a compass with a stick.) Some shelves, along the floor, one, against the south wall, some, from shelves, I see it's a narrow room east-west, dark winter shack, more rooms, a lean-to on the south, a closet door I know ahead, chemical toilet, shut the door quick, a woman who lived there, her name is ---, other women, she tells me she's dead, do I understand how it came to be in the house? It was the circle wasn't it. Yes. There's more of the inside of the house that's there but I can't focus it. A shelf. Looking around seeing other empty shelves, the shelf near the floor, north wall with light from, now I see, east window probably without glass, the house is empty, is this the house I can live in now, looking into the dark end of the room, a fireplace maybe, south wall, and a bed with a washed quilt, Penelope's house, like it, looking through a door seeing there's another room, and perhaps one behind me, maybe the women have been there all along, moving across paths in the darker side, she died to cross through. Dreaming is where that happens, something has changed without being watched, the change is accepted. J and I were impersonating lovers being separated as we have impersonated lovers being together. "Can you sleep?" "Not at all," rolling over pointing tit and parting knees, directly to one moment unquestioned good and others covered dismay, she falls out, the efforts. What is sucking? It has to be the circuit I can dance in that detailed marvelous inflected angled -. When I put my hand on her it no longer was, it was just trying, uncertain, not wanting to. "I want you to give me a compass." That's the right tone. "Aren't I supposed to keep it?" Saying goodbye to the founts - see you in Nepal. The long hair thin on the scalp, looseness in the waist, breast that was none, the lovely mouth, lovely face I couldn't feel, could only remember feeling, staring blanked, "You aren't blanked too?" "Yes I am." "I could see you remembered the connection but you were looking at it from your own space in the river." Around outside seeing it a For Sale sign on a house like others across and beyond, yellow and orange in a bare ground. It's black mid-night, late risen crescent. Today UBC books, driving the car, the pile of books, hunger, and for reading anything, I'm ugly, now, will I really be out of enchantment, I'd just got to seeing with pleasure, when I came home to - and didn't look to see if I wanted it, the seal-spirit, but looked welcoming because it hadn't been able to stay away.
[notes from a book on Catal Huyuk]
Several rooms with hearths - white plastered
A bench, a series of platforms used for work, sleep, and burying the dead under, and at the kitchen end, ladder, hearth, flat-domed oven and fuel cupboard. Store rooms, grain bins. Wall and floor plaster renewed annually. Red ocher, blue azurite, green malachite. Archaic features such as red floors are fewer. Red floors, roof entry, secondary burial, ocher graves. A wide white room, plaster and flagstone, simple wood, ceiling and frames, a small bed with woven cover, a rug, a table, a chair, a lamp, a hearth. The door onto a stairs. The windows over a sea. A blue cupboard. A shelf. Fig tree, grapevine (picking off the leaves covering flowers). [floorplan sketches for one-room house] [sketches of jacket and handmade Navajo boot] Sinitic languages, tones monosyllabic, classifiers, no grammar, word order does it. A phonetic and a radical that indicates the word-group. Grass characters, private notes, familiar correspondence.
Very decided power of the syllable in a tone derived from one of the ancient upper tones to attract the stress to itself 1. It is at least equally likely that the existence of tonal distinctions rendered unnecessary a careful insistence on the remaining elements of pronunciation, and thus, in a negative way, contributed to the phonetic decay of the language. 2. The tone-cut with the words hung below. The strength moved up into the tone phrase. The sound distinction less. 3. Language moving up out of sound into what can be shipped between minds. At first working beside the radio. "I can hear you thinking. Not the words but the rhythm." 4. 'Ship.' The distance from the sea. Who used to stroll over the fields through the whole night Who opening the world of delight meets us at the edge of old stories This is how he grows: by being beaten, decisively, by constantly greater beings. Steep road up. My mother and him. He's telling or inviting me to the pale brown desert he's (going to be) crossing, very cold. I see lumps. Sitting in the (4x4) cab (going to a tree planting camp) we arrive at the (supper stop). He's gone, where's he gone. What I should have remembered: the sense of that place - (grey) brown, lumpy, severe, "30 below", he's in the middle of. "It seemed a waste to get to know anyone." After saying it the silence of feeling and listening to the silence to hear whether what I've said is that I'm defeated, or is it alright and will it one day be different again. "I'm nowhere. And if I started something like that ...." " You'd be somewhere." The plumped-out wine-pink windbreaker, gold cuff little boots, sitting leaning forward, three levels coming forward, eyes, windbreaker, gold cuffs. Borduas "I'm so excited I have to get up and walk around." Am I in this death because I didn't find a way to get into bed with him.
"I felt she belonged to me in a way you didn't." What is it now - we all retract - I was years loyal brightening up enchanted - I couldn't hold any sense against - now it's blank heart and spite - all along you held me less than justly, you wouldn't - "You were all along seducing a cripple" - why am I saying that - T also thinking she was seduced. "Whenever I've been in love like that I've been mistaken." Was I ever in love like that. No. Who have been my companions. Frank. Who has ever spoken in that way, "Something's troubling you, will you tell me."
Cheryl. I was in 1976-1977 and onward across to 1978 and onward in love with Cheryl - is it disintegration? - mid 1976-1978, and then less but still, to end of 1981 and breaking mid-1982. How it is with T, her 'keeping in touch', and now daily, with blankness, 'human contact' without open heart. And in the other way in love with X, standing, letting myself be seen standing, in the terminal, at the glass, nothing better to see or think, stupefied watching without registering, her walk down the slope with her briefcase, black jacket. (Are you ill.) His walk down the slope, my tiny-hands husband without strength to make love with me. The years' sleep hanging on with him. These so many years without life! Without daring to open my heart.
|