| edged out 5 part 3 - 1983 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
23 March 1983 Stuffed - bitterness she's made herself repulsive - impossible - flat plaid cap - she takes it off waves it - she's in a fantasy - I realize now, of being attractive - the stuffed little man - "Excuse me sir" - as fictions they're all offensive - dressed carefully to go out - where is she - I'm obsessed - the other eye - pouched - is she gone forever, have they taken her - wants to put in the picture of Ashrafbi sitting in the chair - "We could have family pictures" - I also want a series of pictures fading out - I don't want all the images to be on the same plane - does she have to be him because he's dying - you're haunted - the distress and repulsion I feel when I look at you - what are you repelled by - you're repelled by death - the way her hands touched him - I'll tell her she must, if she wants to serve him until she dies. 24 Privilege of limit. Venus got through the wires. Mr Recipe. "But could we sometimes talk about it." Beside the porch grew a great rose bush with a trunk as big as a man's arm. - For it was a very strong rose bush and had no shame. By 'having a child' I think she means intercourse. I dreamed Roy said I was finding out what he knew 20 years ago. I said I'd show him the garden. Around the back I was seeing it for the first time. Here's the strawberry bed. Back through, further back than I'd been, down the alley of bushes, a square of trees. I say they're ---. Judy says they're walnut. I see a black spot on a stone under, and agree they're walnut. The clearing they're in is an old plaza, a pale cinema refurbishing; classrooms on the way back up the right side. In the airplane with the woman with twins. I'm holding the boy. She makes a pass (a gesture) and I'm holding the sleeping girl infant, fat peaceful mouth, as we're starting to descend and I want to look down out the window, right. We're coming down into the place I know from other dreams, after the long flight one comes down to a way station where one shifts luggage, changes planes or maybe to another sort of vehicle. Taking the bus suddenly three pieces of luggage unlabeled, if I can somehow label them very fast, someone saying they needn't be labeled, stripping the tape off an old label I see a man's name, London address. I knew the way station from other directions, going there to catch an outbound flight, rushing into the lit room downstairs, which is the terminus. There were areas of walnut trees just beginning to bear and now too big to transplant. He had expected to sell the trees and make thousands of dollars out of them. and cultures are thought by most people in the world to do their business merely by being hierarchies He demonstrates a method. to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols in which I shall explain, without enthusiasm or passion, why there is not a single term used in linguistics which has any meaning for me and does discourse talk about discourse Structuralism - At each level one can identify elements which contrast with one another and combine with other elements to form higher-level units, and the principles of structure at each level are fundamentally the same. Since x is only form and not substance its elements have only contrastive and combinatorial properties, and at each level of structure one identifies the units or elements by their capacity to differentiate units of the level immediately above them. One cannot first identify the units of one level and then work out the way they combine to form units at the next level because the units with which one tries to start - one must simultaneously work out the definition by contrast relations and the combinability relations - are defined from the top down. [Saussure - not sure where]
27 "You'll have to make conversation with them" - "I can make conversation! It's only when I'm a real person that I can't make conversation! When I'm a zombie like I am these days I can make conversation perfectly well! You must have noticed" - bitter shout. Driving to Chilliwack, nausea, the nausea hearing her coming alive about Ingrid. Looking at the jerk of her fat ass in those pointed tight pants - tender prurience with Kathy - "must be how a penis feels inside a body" - rocking the car - "nausea" - telling Trudy it - "It's horrible. When I talk to her I feel nauseated." "I guess Rhoda loves me more than you do, she looked glad to see me." "When it's so long since I touched anyone, I was in such distress." When I say 'loneliness' it sounds self-pitying. Both in ulterior motive we deserve our distress. This is an anguish day. Full moon tomorrow. 28 What is this - seeing her mouth twitch - looking in her face a spark of hate jumps so quietly in the solar - she's in very bad - since I spoke to her she's - 'museau' - wilted potato - how do I have to be - make sure of good meals, intrude nothing from my own badness, quietly make my own judgment and act it without discussion, have thought out the simplest way for things to be done, suggest them without seeming competent, get ready to be unseen for a long time, get ready for there to be no admissions, be willing to see and register without fantasy of change, keep a separate strength immaculate, don't confuse it with being married.
- A node in a system of relations The woman gardening - their garden overlooks a church - the woman in a boat with her children - Han writing her romance with the beautiful Englishman - religion organizing their thoughts In my notes firing to some shine of writing, only, clear (snake songs) still flows. Remembering to assume that any mind I meet will be less able than mine, and then that I can focus it. Meaning should not be something we simply recover. a transit of one network of signifiers a space in this interpersonal net of differences The unconscious becomes a space of representation. the whole system inscribed "A new space of explanation" rather than past - ie it's the location of the past as explanation. Anagram in Saussure - for instance a word carried in sounds of words through a sentence. postulate the existence of an underlying system of relations Argue that the use of binary - most natural and economical code. As the whole system of language is present but not conscious. I know a language but I don't know what I know - the implicit. values, that is to say the social significance 1. language systems 2. desire, psychic economy 3. society, social systems. The subject is personal in these. 'deconstructed' The I that comes to exist at the mirror as what can be seen. Your signifiers of subtle comprehension. Sciences of symbolic activity 'Totalization' - Marxism in 40s - Hegel philos, French political theory, English economics Adding to it: psychoanalysis, Anglo-American psychology, historiography, textual studies Structuralism (anthropology), linguistics, cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, theory of games, computing Cultures seen as organic wholes with constants and variable, a syntax of transformations Cultures are overdetermined and they utter several messages at once. Then Lacan's version of Freud Altusser - symptomatic reading of discourse, 'overdetermination' and Marx's, drew on Lacan Monod - genetic and linguistic - "Language created man." Derrida - Husserl, Heidegger, Nietszche Anti-psychiatry Derrida and Kristeva the internal contestants debated the ideological implications of the concept of sign Piaget - "the notion of the field in physics" - manifest and latent - deep and surface structure in Chomsky's linguistics - 'immanence and manifestation' in semantics - double articulation in structural linguistics Thus: looking to decode The distinction between relations and elements being superceded Both a system of regulated transformations and an openness to the possible Bachelard - epistemological break - when there's a new object to theorize
today when a more profound approach to semantics of discourse seeks to account for fiction and system as in the same spectrum
seemed to speak not as a message sender but a message receiver appeal for recognition which alone would allow certain possibilities to develop for whom language is a problem - who experiences its depth not its usefulness or its beauty speech seen as a horizontal flow with language as a solid residue or deposit building up under it Writing is a general choice of tone. The ever-renewed welling of speech was for the existentialists the very symbol of freedom and autonomy. Jouissance the ecstasy in terror with loss of all notions (of self or culture) struck with self-consciousness by the gaze of all it excludes Works are judged by the awareness they show of the contemporary plight of the writer. the fulfilled love of desire remaining desire included in society in the role of exclusion mobilizing notions His happiness left a lot of people at the gate. led gradually, through an initiation of various styles, registers, and genres, to a mastery aphasias: metaphor, metonymy, condensation, displacement
explain, that is, repoliticize it Reality effect, referential illusion, a set of devices which collude The proletariate occupying the place of unconsciousness in our discourses: the unconscious is not the absence of consciousness. Analytic of money. Natural science: bourgeois. 29
Painting of a mountain with a reflection in the water and feeling of eyes. "I wasn't thinking of you but things were coming to me. I went down quite disheveled and they were all there, it was 10:30. The image I had for you, it was a broken mirror with an unbroken mirror behind it. Eyes. Like a fear of your madness. A chill. An unhumanness." Fear. 31 In bed with Marianne turning to lie facing the foot, pulling the covers, crawling right to the bottom, so her feet would be warm. She's beginning to thrash. In the mirror I see her back jumping up, a bikini bra band across the back and Pete crawling on. Not yet! He's just got in and she's coming. M exhorting and in my protest noticing slips contradicting. Dying, on the train, and that she was leaving her six little ones. In Rhoda's walking through looking at things thinking of her in the last room, the north one, with a (screen door showing through to light), I suddenly see Cheryl and Lorraine at a table, opposite sides. "Excuse me." I turn around leaving. Cheryl accuses. ("You were so absorbed being with Rhoda.") I leave wondering, not arguing, whether that's what I was doing, it had been a quite innocent light looking. 1st April The lump. The dark girl in black. She has wide hair, light shoes. Lying in this bed. Chicken's honk. If it's to die of I won't submit to modern cure. I'll go somewhere alone, write each a letter. What I would want - is meditation depth again. I'd want nothing to do with M, her grimaces, watching her managing socially. Jake's eyes squeezed in lard. "Oma! You are charming." Slight nice body. He and she liking to look at each other. Slight nice body in a print dress, combs in her hair. Her laughter. Magnified eyes. Went in a taxi to fix her teeth. Winsome. "Ehre Sprache is charming." Pleased, bridling, "Na ich hab' sehr viel gelesen." Cracking me up, and then slanting at me from her corners. M in red coat firmly bundling. Her crazy tense hands. The howl in her talk - pressure - energy in movement and talk too much for its work - phrases she trumpets - "We-ell," the emotion bending - seeing her performing - the awkward look up her skirt - after, hearing her voice; it printed - never liking to look at her face and body. 2 A porcelain cup with name in red - J gives me - I find the effort to say: "You put my name on what's Rhoda's." In the car looking in the Korean gardener's younger face openly. We're going to be lovers now, is understood. 3 Coming in to bed at 2:30 from Bino's, turkey, vegetable and crackers - Ezra comes to the top of the stairs - under two sleeping bags and too deep pillows, thigh cold rising through to shape skin muscle - huddle - awake in early light - if I could be with Luke four years old again - under the trestle table plugging in toaster - cutting wheatberry muffins, sour smell, Woodwards first food vouchers with Luke - at the table seeing a nurse walk home from night shift - eating steak and egg seeing the summer ocean filling out in the yards - at the bus stop lay down the pole pruner and brown grocery bag of lunch - smoked glasses, for strain - the weed child - she won't hear me this time - J going over the discretion into flattery - walking away anxious - the fit in the bus - ugly woman and two sons - the loop at a waste field - long journey - pleated forehead - her talk nauseating - or the bus - am I giving in to reversal, I must keep that balance - "Muss has been looking nice, I even liked talking to him on the phone" - "Were you really at Sunday School" - "I don't know what you mean by that gesture" - a broad smile - "Is it an embarrassed smile?" - "I don't think so" - into the bush lightening it - Shirin not able to speak to me - leaving the little pain at having spoken to them, familiar, sad at what feels self damage, I don't either mean attack, only the true neutrality, there is nothing here for me - bananas, cane chairs lying crooked, planning work. 4 On a boardwalk across water dropping my clothes in. The folded two hundreds, are they still in my pocket. Laying the soaking clothes on a boat's roof. all my clothes have fallen in. I dreamed this laying soaked clothes on a boat roof - doing it now isn't different - it means dreaming and being awake aren't different, both happen. Cringing from her sound with the children, social talk with Muss, Angela. What are people. Coming down the roller hill by the PNE she says I do act more like somebody who is going to die but she often dies, she often dies by way of me, I don't use her well, with Cheryl and Trudy I was willing but with her I refuse - I'd like to think there is something I've missed but I know what she has in mind is her baby madness - oh no baby I have to stand as firm as I can, otherwise it is not --- - you won't use what you can - thinking of her in the closet in her undershirt, fat tit in thin wool, then she is covering her arm with her hand, it smote me. Offer me something I want so much I will do anything. - [Castenada 1971 A separate reality] Fibres of light like white cobwebs, very fine threads that circulate from the head to the navel, thus a man looks like an egg of circulating fibres, arms and legs like luminous bristles, bursting out in all directions. Everyone is in touch with everything else through a bunch of long fibres that shoot out from the centre of his abdomen, those fibres join to surroundings, keep balance, give stability. They resemble a dripping piece of cloth. Lyric sorcerers the dilettantes Watch carefully everything you do. The very thing that could help you develop your will is amidst all the little things you do. Being with her with them. Every part of it moved. I perceived a contained, undulatory, rhythmical flow; it was as if the flowing was enclosed within itself, never moving beyond its limits, and yet the object in front of my eyes was oozing with movement in any place on its surface. It was a mesmerizing fluttering. It was not light as I am accustomed to perceiving light, or even a glow; rather it was movement, an incredibly fast flickering of something. When I focused my gaze the face became at once the luminous object. When you see, what you gaze at becomes nothing and yet it is still there. Ripples were immobile. I could look at every one of them, then they began to acquire a green phosphorescence and a sort of green fog oozed out of them. The fog expanded in ripples and as it moved, its greenness became more brilliant until it was a dazzling radiance that covered everything. All I had was a quiet awareness, the awareness of a brilliant, soothing greenness. When I think of your smoke I feel a sort of darkness coming upon me. It is as if there were no more people on earth, no one to turn to. I had the impression I was entangled, at a very deep level, and when I wanted to talk, had to surface like a diver, I had to ascend as if pulled by my words. I preferred to remain at the strange level of silence where I could just look. If you want to see you must overcome the guardian of the other world. focus all my attention on the fog but not abandon myself to it tiny bubbles, round objects that came into my field of vision and moved out of it with a floating quality The movement of the bubbles had slowed down. They were so large and slow I could examine them in detail. They were not really bubbles. They were not containers, yet the were contained. Nor were they round. When I ceased to view them as bubbles I was able to follow them. In fact I was the bubble, or that thing which resembled a bubble. The timing of each sound was a unit in the overall pattern of sounds. Thus the spaces or pauses in between sounds were, if I paid attention to them, holes in a structure. At a given moment the pauses became crystallized in my mind and formed a sort of solid grid, a structure. I was not seeing it or hearing it. I was feeling it with some unknown part of myself. I began seeing the sounds as they created patterns and then all those patterns became superimposed on the environment. For some reason my attention was focused on the large hole in the hills. There was something of a lure about it. Every single sound pattern which coincided with a feature of the environment was hinged on that hole. At the crucial moment a thought came into my mind. I knew what x meant when he spoke of the items of a path with heart being the shields. There was something I wanted to do in my life; something very consuming and intriguing, something that filled me with great peace and joy. I knew the ally could not overcome me. The worms, the birds, the trees, all of them can tell us unimaginable things if only one could have the speed to grasp their message. The smoke can give us that grasping speed, but we must be on good terms with all the living things so when the warrior peers through the holes the trees, birds, worms give true messages. Looking out, over the neighbourhood, a hill's crown, blossoms in a state so I feel I want to go out and see all of it, walk all around. At the Abbotsford bus depot as I have my door open and we are quite harshly taking leave, she says this time she was quite comfortable, not what I think is true, seeing her face and body, saying with what I think is defiance from my instruction, "If you weren't, that's not my affair," staring in the coldness, which is also to make sure there's no touching, and really disliking her, "If you were comfortable I think you probably weren't listening." There was nothing in the visit but the equal particulars, as it is with others. 5 [Christine Downing 1981 The goddess: mythological images of the feminine Crossroads] She experiences deep mourning, for the loss of the other, as loss of self. The temple to Hades at Eleusis in a natural cave, the temenos. A natural cave within the rocky side of the hill.
Psyche needs images to nurture its own growth. a knowledge we interiorize, can take to that place in ourselves where water and where reeds and grasses grow. I make my way into another cave well beneath the earth's surface. Though she is palpably there I cannot discern her shape. Happy is he who having seen these rites goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginnings. The underworld opened in love the unlit door of earth Dionysus is the god of women. Image sexuality secrecy that may represent something unconscious the spirit of the brightest vigilance which grasps with lightning speed what the instant requires [Walter Otto The Homeric gods] 9 Assembling small parts. With him watching his work. His face is one I like, fine and suffering. Elephant embryos. Reproduction. Setting a top part on a bottom part and folding it upward. I see my fingers do it with a pleasing motion. His eye moves. My coat fell open, looking diagonally down I see my tit. From his angle he may have seen it. The elephants (will be) big at the front, small at the back. I may have showed it to him. There were other men working, I saw before him, but his face is different. On a trip somewhere with a yellow cliff, a man I knew in college, first I see and perhaps recognize him, then he comes back, stands in front of me, reminds me aggressively we won a ring together. A class we were in. His name on a name bar NAUM, Middle Eastern. He went back, twenty years since we've seen each other, or he's been in this part of the world. He has a round belly loose on a big thin frame, a Semitic face. He's intense, jerky, quite odd and likeable. We sold the ring, gave a party for our friends. It's from a time I remember well, the year I had international friends (the year was there, but not he). I cuddle up to him, intimate. He's been twenty years in a desert country, he's displaced. I begin to introduce him to my parents and Jam, he misunderstands. I say "No, it's just - ." We're all in transit. Later I see him in the corridor with his wife, their heads together. - Ariadne gives birth after death. A birth into death, the imaginal, a birth in the soul, of soul. At the center of the labyrinth one returns to the beginning. What gives events the dimension of soul. In transit with the whole family, war or about to be. I'm thinking it's that it's time everyone was shifted, the peaceful time (here, in this house and neighbourhood) is over, they can board ship for the Crimea. They, it's Oma too, are herding along and I'm expected to come, but thinking will I, it could be different there than I imagine, not old Europe again, a new settlement. Luke might look for me there knowing it's where Mennonites go, but I turn around, say nothing, go back up the gangway against the current, and am at loose with North America chosen, walking at random. Watching the strange traffic, then a wood (go-cart), a young woman sitting in a wrapping of barbed wire, under a little curved canopy. It's her night shelter, I'm thinking. They see my look, four light-looking young women. They look focused and light-hearted. The one with earrings says "You look like a s---," (come with us if you want). I go round the front (back) of the box, say "I think I am a s---, but I'm a Pisces," climbing into the box. They laugh. I made the jest without understanding it. They are going out into the land, the Indians may help them hide. Low red winter sunset sky. We're driving fast down into malls and plazas, corridors, rectangles, right angles, doorways, see people not fleeing, in classrooms, shopping. We're driving very fast, corners without consultation. I don't know if they are following signs or whether they know the way, it may be by instinct. We want to get to the deepest level quickly. It's from there we'll (get out). The moment we're stopped, I don't have a look of who stops us, it's a (guard and another), the earring girl is explaining what we do. Each of us takes a color (5) we (meditate) the vibration of. Together we may be able to ---. He isn't going to let us go. She is saying with a deliberation I don't understand, like a staged anger, "Then take your ---," and slides toward him a small disc that goes off. Two circles of vaporization. The larger is the guard, and the smaller, aside, the assistant. Then listening to a man's voice, as if summoned by the use of a weapon he gave, to advice: "You'll have to learn to scout ahead," and a little more. We are then as if in an opener place, but I wake (the red sky may be here.) full of the story of having chosen to stay in America and go underground while my people go into an unknown somewhere else. An earlier one going across fields (Clearbrook), an abandoned field of raspberries they said. The fields I actually went across, the gravel road, fast traffic. I came out on a kind of road I didn't expect to be there, if it's there. It should've gone through where I started from and it didn't. Am I turned around. That early drizzling morning, people driving to work. A woman without a coat, black hair and sweater, thin shelter. A lost middle-aged woman on the roads in back country. A girl on a bicycle says it's the wrong way. a Chinese adolescent boy in a stucco ranchhouse on a bare yard. A Mennonite young married man backing out of his driveway. Coming again from the far side, the wide loop and the strangeness of it, then cold for hours after it, Mary and I in the labyrinth of the storage park, she not able to remember the number and nearly driving into the wall, "Watch out for the wall!" in exasperation, did she not hear the tone, contempt, women really are inferior, she thanks me for warning her. Across the fields, big berries like cranberries, 'mulberries,' who are you dreamer, a building with somethings left in it, warned off by an old man, this is not clear, across a field I see has bulls in, the fence I think to shelter behind, a bull there too, there's no way out, I am aimed for that one, with speed, then wonder if it's the right
Turquoise, coral, black, white The dead child. The life of death. 10th To go north for the evaporation. Vaporization. In the last days talking to a young boy who wanted to be a theologian. At, before, a performance the young woman invites me to wrestle without clothes. At first it's stretching against each other. Then she lets me bend her in shapes with me, that we hold for a second and re-form. She puts an oil on my breast, says it's only putting on oil but we could go continue at Sandy's. I say better not Sandy's. Named her Poppy, which is to say: pleasure. Sunday. Where I was / not raining. The smarmy moment from guilt I'd touched myself and lost desire. Angela's [Bowering] thesis (poisoned flesh, obsession), reading again noticing the undertow believing. I was reading through and then not knowing whether she has found it all herself. Wanted to be beyond it and liking to think her lucid, the first reading objected to her terms, that didn't seem hers. Then reading from inside consciousness of her code, not offended. Light touch fur and horn, don't have to look to know she's - ow. The herb man I speak to, and he immediately allows, in a new authority, to a supplier, wood. With not much relation to her, or anyone, I command what I know to be used. 11 Tony Reif with his hair longer, and opener, at a filmmaking club, says I can do it better than the (apparatus), if I hold up the image, the projector behind me. When I stare at a point, I choose the small face, and it goes black, the image has come onto the screen. My eye is the crystal. Can glance up and see 4 images on the screen, movement too, which goes on when I am glanced away. Not knowing how to do it but staring and then seeing the spot darken. Then after, knowing to stare so it goes black. Liking Tony, as we pack up, thinking I'd like to go out with him. J and Michael, Michael saying don't I get letters every week from Roy. I am surprised, I'm stammering when I say no we are not connected, he isn't what I want. River gravel. 12 Meeting someone from tree planting, says six camps are out, (J) with me asks an arriving planter if he's ---. "No, I'm Robert." "You're Robert!" seizing his hand, compounding it, grasping his arm with her other hand, looking at him, eyes magnified through glasses, short lined. Too many French in the camp, homely, worn man, maybe being with the French made him shorter. Looking at (J), the man I'm with is - I already have - tall, slim and young. Letter from Luke. 13 Grasshopper in Greek "figures a bond between the living and the dead." Traveling (north of Edmonton), meets a man who tells or shows a door with its doorway laid down, makes a bed, in the bush, in an unfinished house, I can use when traveling. I tell my mother the story. When I do stop there, the man is, but I pass unseen to the back, he's talking on the phone. It has become a small room with a bed high up I crawl onto, will wait for him. When he comes it's with his boyfriend, appeasing him, thin blond, peers at me, "Your face is very big, it's because I (---)," touching his back, in French maybe, "Do you mind if I touch you, I am not really a woman," sits with his legs stretched forward to touch my friend's knees, he's bringing himself by moving his hips a little. We are looking at my friend's quite little penis, which is as if the blond man's, when it squirts up sticky semen. My sideline sadness, there's no one for me. Yesterday. Morning phone. Phonebox in early sun, bicycle, leaned under the billboard, waiting to speak to, soup and juice made, Arbutus bus, up the gravel alley looking at plants, the dog's face in a gap. She has had an idea, wass die Jamila noch ausfindet, long detour, the complexity of what has to be done together, tree unwrapping roots, sand spill, stake, moments animating, when she said "Those were the nights, my friend!" being girl loved and delighted, and then her fading away, as the night before, when my hands got only a little excited, "I'd like to stop for a while." Angry, not saying so, you fleabag, you old impotent. 14 After that, freakout, no mind for the work, figuring, again and again, simple sequence, in hatred, traveling, bus, in hatred noticing the spite against anyone coming on, feeling sorry for the gaze they have to see, the worst, an open contempt staring at the boy with the cap, Jewish, and his sister, their soft larval mouths, looking after them seeing her get rid of it, by a hopped spirit push. Coming upstairs, "Are you sleeping?" She says "Come give me a kiss," I lie down and weep, there's a pressure further back than I'm able to sob out, reaching around to try to pull it forward. "I want you to know this won't be fine, it's just medicine." Then her face came through again though we grinded. The exhaustion, strung-out, the nerve exhaustion I only know after lying beside her. 15 It's probably just before ovulation. Somewhere before - Imagining dropping down through the rainforest, a green canopy, the breakdown through it, rapid, and through to volcanic stones, black, stepping into the sea, "I can feel it around me," saying it and feeling it, saying I felt it, trying to remember the imagined, warm-cool sinking in, water. Explaining how I can run on hands and feet, can't run upright like others, but I can gallop, is it along a cliff. He's going in to town, I'll go too, change my pants, red ones, shoes, in the morning, the --- came very early, I wait to hear he missed it but it's that he was taken to jail, for drugs, Cheryl sold him. How did they make a connection, did they discover they both knew me, --- (something), I walk into his cell, books and typewriter, he's not glad to see me, not unglad, it was in a café where he used to read, the --- ---, she and Max, Max was there too? One of his guests says they must --- the fluorescent light, apply something to it that makes it flash radiation / / / / brilliant bad zaps I roll out onto the balcony away from. There behind the door his bed, his bed. Going back to his cell, they've left, I'll leave. The gracious visiting singer, looks like Aunt Lillian, want to talk to her, when I go to that side, the room spinning: it's John's book room, with old record player. They are listening when I enter. I sit down by her, wait for the spin to stop, small shacks at the four corners where it can stop, it can lunge off any of them, some child. Through a park, here, hear "my shooting lessons," come past the hedge, a gun range behind the president's house, the grouse are regathered by jumping the perch on the keeper's gun barrel, aside in the foreground, mother and small children, the baby sitting, I lift to its feet, it's never been on, likes it, livens, I may have done a wrong thing, they never let her onto her feet because she has to sit still while the mother (works), their livelihood depends. And evening: Impersonating, speaking to any of them. When she's on her axis, with them - today, was intending to stay back, ie standing back and talking to myself about doing it, as if her, her positioning, former, different because with reference, that inner discussion, and then, I can really listen, as if I were reading, and then trying. "This is my old friend Stell." She got taller and lit up. Her molecules expanded. Miko sitting on the step looking at. "I have to stop saying I like people, it's stupid." In blessed heat on the sward raised by the sidewalk, organist running in wild ground over south in the morning. The young ones talk passing after school and then the denser north-south noise rush with less light, thinner space from down the street. As my eyes are on the ground. Don't be impressed by that vocabulary - hearing it working on someone else - that's what to look very carefully at - exposedness of work. 16 Looking for a hotel I've stayed in before in London, after getting off on the bride, realizing they were going home to North London (Vancouver), van. In a movie house there's a wall they're stopped at. She comes in and through it, who, holding it up to the man in the suit showing. On one side I see through to him, turned, I see his legs again, reflective. But I seem to be seeing his legs again from near his head. The panel that (shows what he sees, on one side, turned, what I see). Running on hands, stilts, find I can come onto my feet without a stop by just bending over. What makes me write unexactly so I have written what isn't so and then have to go back. Happens in the last half of sentences. The same as the talk I can't do over carefully. Saying then thinking. She says and I improve. Artemis the Upright because her statue was found standing upright in a thicket. 17 Why does she think of what happens in the womb as inscribing. Hacking, cutting, etching, scraping, scratching, inscribing, characters. 'The mother.' The talking womb. The old lady. 'The mother.' The talking womb. [Some of this from Angela Bowering's MA thesis on Sheila Watson's *] Film is memory of sequence. The verbs are more reliable than the nouns. the abortion of female intelligence in metaphor. that interrupted seminar where I developed the theme of anxiety and the petit object a Oracularly os eye spring rim split rock the fear of dying somewhere alone, caught against a tree or knocked over in an inch of water Seeing that doesn't speak itself outward paralyses. the stench of coyote's bedhole emptiness that can't be born their mother's domination of their sexuality grotesque symbolic coupling and imprisonment modulations of one voice, the voice of the earth that speaks from beneath the text to tell us of the old lady's persistent presence fur grown over his eye not only her mother's lamp but knowing and seeing, altogether her language knows she's connected to backward to under coyote's eye Cave - "the figures scratched there present us with puzzles having to do with primitive activities" seeing, saying, hearing, doing, remembering She only half sees and does not really see what lies before her because she is helpless to control what possesses her. the abortion of female intelligence in metaphor that overmind A cap of consciousness is over my head, my forehead, affecting a little my eyes. Things about me appear slightly blurred as if under water. It is only an effort to readjust focus. sees a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone. Into that over-mind thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water. from normal to abnormal consciousness, grinding mental agony first in my head. I visualize it just as well now centred in the love-region of the body or placed like a foetus in the body. Vision is of two kinds - vision of the womb and vision of the brain. When the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body we have vision of the womb or love-vision the majority of dream and of ordinary vision the love-brain and the over-brain like a lens We may enter the world of overmind consciousness directly, through use of over-mind brain. We may enter it indirectly light concentrated in the middle of my forehead, inside my skull. It was small and giving out a soft light, light concentrated in itself as the light in a pearl. We can use this pearl for concentrating and directing pictures. To hold the power over him that her womb does. "Incestuous." With the lamp by the fence holding it up in broad daylight looking where there's nothing to be found. The artist is older than the fish. The still. The still resurrects. Still the old lady fished. Fishing shamelessly with bait. Not only her mother's lamp but knowing and seeing, altogether. Waiting to be lit up by their release into action. Shapes are shapes until syntax makes them move. Cervix. "Eye and thought." Those who cling to the rocks I will bring down. Matricide - abortion. This barely formed perception undercut by the falling old lady. Matricide under the jaw of the roof. In my mouth is forgetting. In my darkness is rest. The mother murder in circular space. Wo Es war soll Ich werden.
Something organizes this field, inscribes its initial lines of force Natural object believed to be ancestral and/or tutelary Linguistics whose model is the combinatory operation functioning spontaneously in a presubjective way In our time this is the way to think of the unconscious. The unconscious is structured like a language. The concept is always established in an approach that is not unrelated to that which is imposed on us as a form by the infinitesimal calculus. This thing speaks and functions in a way quite elaborate as at the level of the subject. The discovery by which the subject feels himself overcome - by which he finds both more and less than he expected It is always ready to be lost again - discontinuity - Everything I have taught in recent years has tended to exclude this need for a closed one. Syncope - elision - gap as in synapse - cop cut, hapsis join. rhythmic structure of this pulsation of the slit Appearance/disappearance 18
In the dream, in parataxis, in the flash of wit, what is it that strikes one first? It is the sense of impediment. Something stumbles. Something other demands to be realized. Whose creatures are all eyes looking out of its shadows at each other - Kip
This is the locus where the affair of the subject of the unconscious is played out. a special spectre situated between perception and consciousness Interval still other layers in which the traces are constituted this time by analogy functions of contrast and similitude constitution of metaphor Die Idee der anderer Localität metaphor something originally repressed there, and which always re-emerges in the ambiguity of lameness, the impediment and the symptom, of non-encounter, the meaning that remains hidden. Why are the erogenous zones all rim structures. The oral drive is the vampire. claim to something separated from him but that belongs to him and which he needs to complete himself if a beam of light directing our gaze so captivates us that it appears as a milky cone and prevents us from seeing what it illuminates It is opaque - the screen. The beauty with whom one wishes to speak is there, behind, only too willing to open the door, the window, the shutters, or whatever. It is to the beauty one must speak. 131 The real is: coming against the obstacle. He must get out, get himself out, and in the getting himself out he will know that the real other has, just as much as himself, to get himself out. It is here the need for good faith, based on the certainty that the same implication of difficulty in relation to the ways of desire is also in the other. who wished to abandon nothing of her register The register of the master, and the values to which she sacrifices, bring her to renouncing the depth of herself. As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere, there is the transference. Passivity, narcissism and ambivalence "strictly speaking what is called identification." What one doesn't keep, outside, one keeps an image of. Identification is that. Whatever is experienced as special The object a stays steady, subject does not. There are few who don't succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself. It is in the space of the other that he sees himself and the point from which he sees himself is also in that space.
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