| edged out 6 part 2 - 1983 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
June 1983 [Back in Vancouver] Focus. What I've forgotten and remember, that there's nothing without it. If I begin with one saying I'll then see more. My image and her image. Then seeing there's more difference. Tuesday - I'd like to find the steady explaining voice to clear. The way it was last evening and what I was seeing. The first thing to say - is how I was looking at her fatness, chin and belly and even wrist, the round sac under her chin and the painful cut across her belly-fat of the tight waist - in front of that I have to put (the moment) I looked at an envelope, Oliver, who? Not recognizing the hand and then seeing it's Robert, will I tell her no, and how I'd return as we talked to rehearsing what position I'd prepare to meet him, behind that, the night I came home, making love to myself, it won't be there for her, these guilts, another, that I wanted to be playing with her and Akbar not being visited alone by her showing him herself visiting her girlfriend, playing in the sense of power too, finding out whether I can beat him, impressing him, and knowing I was in London really not loving her. Being glad to be away, and building my firmness of not wanting to be a mother, and that with at the same time a doubt that my underlife could be meaning the opposite. Walking: shouting (coming to the granite setts) how much I detest the life with small children, I won't fight those battles again, the stupidity of everything in how they are with small children, I say that immediately when I imagine having a child with her I find myself wondering whether I could abandon it to her, then there was that about how she'd get a woman, she saying, but her delight, and that she'd learn everything - and then looking at persuasion. Some of what she says I feel myself being persuaded by, - and do I think she's capable? (I'm always just getting by.) I am these days watching very carefully just that - does she know something I don't or is she (qualities are about whether one can be in a life with them) an unreliable system - come into my world she says - I begin to come into my focus when I say yes I like there to be other worlds and I said I felt a wish to step into one but I didn't know how - if you can't come in and bring your sanity you mustn't come - my sanity is necessary for you too! I must have my sanity for you also! But what I'm also seeing then is that when she says her world she means the world she imagines she's in, that isn't heterosexual and so has no feminism (she's got that better formulated, I'm thinking at the same time as I do not give up knowing what she won't know, that 'her world' is utterly heterosexual.) I am seeing and saying (and also with a sense of tactic) that what I mean by an other world is not that, I'm feeling more holy as I find it to feel and say that if we were realizing the actual otherness of the worlds we would not be experiencing it as an issue. We'd be finding out, what do you see, what have you known - she has prepared that notion of that's what you do when you've put the child to bed - I say have you ever seen a marriage like that - feeling how really unreliable she is if she doesn't look at the actual to test her picture, and when she says no she hasn't but - I also feel that tone of persuasion, maybe she is so special she can make her own way, maybe she knows herself - I go to pee and come back feeling I am in focus and can press into the understructure, she has been sitting while I begin to feel lucid with her back to me, on the stairs, turning her head over her shoulder. I say there is a picture there, I feel maybe I can mend a circuit, will you tell me more of what it's like (unpack the picture). I'm also feeling a thrill which is a little righteous, simple? About getting to a moment where I can try to look at an actual otherness, it has gotten dark, is it the nightfall mind that's given me this solitude mobility like dope. She refuses to be unpacked, her excuse is not true but her bitterness is real, the unpackings she has agreed to have not secured her, reproduction is not a metaphor she says, it is a drive, I say, when I said I don't understand what reproduction is for you I didn't mean it's a metaphor (at that moment I think I meant a sensation, though I had a doubt and couldn't say it). The outcry - "If you can't do what I want to do you must let me do what I can do" - was I the only one hearing it. I was mistaken - I think she is saying it without believing it, she is still trying to corral me - the possibility that I could have been mistaken about something like that - a trade. I can't see the road because there's no companion on it - it will never be any different than this - this really makes me cry - people who have vested interests and who try to get the other to become something for them - I (turquoise boy) don't like that there's that other little dream jumping up finger high in this purifying grief - Why are you saying there'll be somebody else? I'm being polemical - why is she being polemical, what corruption is in her. Does it mean the companion is nonsense and there'll be someone else indeed, nevermind seeing into other worlds, there's real kissing, that's the companionship I'm crying for? Saying she could've done the newspaper with someone else, but my face show'd something so - ! - she's dreaming, she thinks she really could've, she is willing to use that idea without checking it through to know that it isn't possible - ! - I'm trying to remember what it was I was realizing when my face showed that shock - as she talks and I try not to listen - it was as she said ground dropping from under - but what - standing outside the bank, I said I was going to England, I'll do it with someone else, I was imagining she meant Laiwan - the shock, was it, she isn't realizing she can't do it - she's dreaming - was it, she doesn't care who she does it with - was it - it was something I'd thought before, she doesn't want to do it with me - I don't feel I've found it. Other - on the log saying honesty's no good to me anymore, because honesty says I want what I really don't want - I say, if I really don't want to be a mother what is it that I do want. She says You like to be pregnant, you want to have the company of the sweetness of the young child, you want to be taken care of in that way you also have trouble with - she means by the father and. I am crying but is it the father? When I go back to it: what do I want, I want my own childish love, open heart. ("Something in the writing you are seduced by too.") ("My idea of it is more that your writing would change because you'd be in your pleasure of it more" - yes - that persuades - I do miss - but I know that pleasure and its limits, it was my home but the writing of it always had that limit.) (You could be writing it - almost - I can't say I'm interested, I have to go on remembering the food, clothes, little friends, manners, that she doesn't account for.) And beyond this always the astonishment at the fantasy taking such hold that I am debating as if it is a real possibility, ie I have entered her world, suspecting that the whole picture I need to save (us) me is there outside the debate: what is the debate for, because it is not for deciding whether or not Jam and I will have a child. #1 it is for the excitement in the gut that is also fueling these pages of continuous writing. #2 it is for the fueling of our hours of debate, that is, just having something to do together (if you succeed in removing me from my desire you will also have succeeded in having lost me - a wail.) And what is it we do do in that passion, we work our circuits for each other's correction, or is it correction, for each other's connection, we show our circuits. I have the image of branchy white tracks set out from one head, some blue fluid entering partway, it's an animated black and white film. A head sending out the white circuits, from the position of the viewer's head come the blue infusions, in-feelings (placental), red from below, edges of the screen, conducted from. We show our circuits, we show out our circuits. When she said she didn't distinguish insight and tropism I went on say but -. But I saw something and what was it. Tropism. A light. The trope was toward sun. Insight was a turning toward a feeling of litness. Singing about Jesus they feel they understand. They feel lit in understanding which is just a light in an instinct, a light in the body, (a light in) a particular place in the body is turned on and it feels like knowledge. (Consider - I mean / the star is in the belly.) The intuition is the turning toward that place of feeling. Alright. And then, she heard herself saying instinct, had she confused - had my protests, and the covered but registered sense of her brilliant freedom from literal meaning - she bragged it, these days I'm no longer interested in making that sort of distinction - mm yes she was bragging, from the sense of herself she'd rebuilt while I was gone (but if I join your world I'll be puffed like you) - then I was complaining that I have to work at checking her (did that with Roy too - she says, you would be doing that anyway, I say, I have an assignment that means I have to do it, I want to do difficult things that need me to have a solid ground - while she climbs out the window so Trudy can see her). And how could I make myself not have to check her - what would happen if you didn't - I don't say - but there'd be no connection - placenta to your circuits - kidney machine - I'm cleaning you - she says "I do that for you too in another way" - does she? the conscience of my 'body' - the taboo'd function - filter it out but only it not the other kinds. Your panic about Laing - you were putting on the brakes - what do you mean! - then I remembered, it wasn't what she thought but - oh I get it! I've got it, I've remembered - about not being an inventor but also - the whole piece is saying wanting a child, to be pregnant. (Or: is it saying, wanting a man.) Then, I have to not show it, and have no work left. It betrays me. Then, the panic wasn't long, I looked at it again and thought, if it's saying that, let it, I'll stand by the form my actual desire has taken, I won't go on being frightened of a secret it tells, that they see and I don't know. That it will tell something I haven't known. How I've cheated myself. That I want what I make a career of not wanting. Brushwood: the greyness, confusion, incredulity, attack, when she in her argument uses something I've said as a meaning it wasn't - can she really have thought - anger, can she really be misunderstanding so much, what is the murk she's in - image of a pile of brush - watching, is her thought really incompetent, are her circuits spoiled, is it that project of hers, the lie in the centre, that's making her queer what comes to her in this astonishing way - or am I misunderstanding, not to believe her - haywire - she saying it's clear, I saying no it is grey it is unclear, she saying it feels like that because - because - but no, there is too much misunderstanding in the detail, if it was clear. When it is clear, we can be (he's writing a physiology) in grief but we like each other's statements of it. That was the first of the focus, then it was saying that what is hard on me is not the decision, but the involvement in it for her of gender, that when she says it's another world - - Seeing, watching, how she's figured out explanations while I'm gone, how wrong some of them are, others, the persuasion, or - yes, that's it. Then feeling the space, something like being backed into a bigger field to see us in, saying the real otherness of the worlds we haven't begun to see, if we did, we wouldn't be in this dispute. You've needed me for your writing, to evoke it and not be able to do it. I say: companionship is in the quality of focus. To myself: don't let focus leave, for anything, don't give it up, for anyone, any help (welfare), if focus depends on vigilance without comfort, telling the truth I know without sophistication, without regard, humor, feeling of competence of handling ("the ferocity of the infant conscience"). Still there isn't a choice because without focus there is nothing, no road. Seeing the uncertainty I've been in, focus has gone, I don't really know whether it's truth that brings it (whether not lying to welfare -), (telling her immediately about R). Is it the self of desire that wants to give anything for focus, is in it the open heart my throat was aching for. Is it what turquoise boy will bring me, already did bring, the memory of. What do I think focus demands - an absolute giving up of advantage. What did bring it - what does - yelling - going through the crazy circuits even without telling everything - crying - fighting for my life in her brushpile. So am I wrong in the ideal - (but we were transformed - though she didn't understand - when I was in the fight to have no lies in my and as much of her as I could get to - circuits.) Is the density of the damage of her system more than I should go on servicing; is the complexity the advancedness of her system slowed too much by my caution, old ways -
The ideal I think I make is: give the difficulty of true telling, and I'll give, focus, and standing in true knowledge. If it is not a moral law, but it is my law.
One more thing - in the aft copying in type out of journal - 'working' - imagining giving it to her to read - her to see the nice things - "flying through lumps" - what is - then not being able to give any of it - what would satisfy.
Someone to be with me in me - with a torch - when have I been satisfied - when I told you that dream I saw it better than I had before - better attention - the wildness when she misunderstands - (did Pound give her - was Pound her bridge, skeleton, that helped her speak to white women) - and beyond it is miasma - one who can't and shouldn't speak to white women. And - clarity! Stay with me for this other meeting, just make sure I keep saying without resistance, steadily without believing anything is what I fear it is. Branches of exposed bone which are grown each summer The animal bodies with their limits - it dies because it will eat only - the young must feed themselves, cannot stand exposure, if there is a rainy spell will die - each kind being its kind by not (being able to) changing its same tissues to do what another can - is there in a cell the limit of the whole shape - DNA. Antlers are fully grown but still covered in velvet they are sensitive when knocked - stags avoid brushing them against hard surfaces, until about August when the velvet dries and is rubbed off. Velvet is skin covered by fine hairs.
[three more pages of v-l words] Phase-locking Strangers "if attentive" For instance a profound change in rhythm during transition from Latin to French Calls it being in the zone It brightens, the place becomes smaller Because indeed the voice of protection and order is a resistance it takes strength to struggle with this voice.
Opening for itself a coherent path I was tormented by limitations of understanding Trying to make passages to work my way through but without obstructing the other ones -
semantic differential are unified by an image symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to - Being in a depth of attention to the nature of the time passing - 'magic' Delay - the time it takes the body to answer 30 Luke when I get him back. The nurse looks in his diapers, is it always like that, touches him between neck and shoulder, I am beginning to realize he was older before, walking and speaking, now he's like a 6-month infant, what he eats goes straight through, yelling, can't find my other boot, at Roy. When he comes it's as a tall girl sitting down quietly next to me while my friend talks to someone else I recognize him immediately, say come in - while I'm putting on a big pot of water I see his back naked he's taken off his costume and his look: he's a gross, whiskered, queer, (Colette he visited first, I'm annoyed say notorious and bunny), how do you make your face smooth? Does it work for you cruising, can they tell you aren't a girl, you look just like one. Before waking: having head near between his and his lover's pouring them coffee through the sieve into small cups, the coziness when I've woken is with the pillow. July 2 My mind is a woman - balancing well of two legs - her daughter with strong eyebrows turned sideways reading (Antoine et) Le bossu - elle est studieuse - when she walks off she isn't thinking whether to - show her joy - agony of loneliness I say to her - what is it really - agony being unable to go to the good minds I saw, and having it sent back to me, in those who did want to speak to me, who I shrank from - registered - feeling my head looked at and then less, overcome? In talking I should be in front, I should be presenting - the anguish all day of wrong conversation, theirs and when I can't like to look at them, my own - voices sank in - with her the wild apprehension, there's something in her, frightening me - oh, so there was - ! - no not balancing - the sickness of forms used again - speaking - what will I be able to say to this one - beauté - elle est d'une telle beauté - no I was not - the light one with the eyes - greeting but I hadn't found why - I have to be this lonely one wanting to be beautiful - oh but like her balancing on her legs hamster - substantial - eyebrows - are you happy they like your work, it has its place - not liking the sound of her clap clap clap - no you can't keep me now - up and almost to the door the eyes looking at my foot, first I saw in these days - what it was, Penny [Goldsmith] isn't going to take my piece.
- Any of them, it's no use, they won't - the woman who said the message was go home - my message was, I'm sad - on the right easy names, light, up, air, it says breathe, float - in the right here close to me it's calm and strong but it says I'm sad - it's her work soul too - the work soul isn't sad or glamorous. 3 [women's writing conference] The way some are strongly present - if when I speak of her I use her name, she will take on another power - close to, smallness - under eye creases, intimately, dry - cuticle -eye, eye, hole, blue is far sealed - mouth, looking into (while she says) color (my husband and I -). Behind the blackboard against the last of the convention business I was asking what do you know already, she startled and telling me where she's worked, four years at Bell Telephone, setting up a system for - who had said her muse was elliptical, in bed is where a man can be glad to be with a strong woman - have got myself next to her and speaking - the ivory color of her face, thinness of the muscle, how she holds her head (hereditary money), her nose, how she is not visual in her clothes, strange purple shoes, bowtie teeshirt, body's thinness like a possibly quite old child, small, exposed but nothing to expose, upright, quiet, restless but not in its posture (as I always am having to twist my limbs) walking around and talking, when she said corporation, yes, technical writing. Sklera Epi dermis derma dermatos dermal Skin effect in electricity tendency of alternating current to flow more densely in the outer layers and on the surface of a conductor, than in the interior. At birth Virginia opossums are smaller than honey bees. [record of the two sides exercise when I first learned it at a poetry workshop: color, sound, season, gender, direction, animal, element, smell, texture, an era, what it's like to be there, a symbol, a message, what part of body
Wanting to say, maybe more, something about the fix of bodies, J for instance having set herself not to see them, what she doesn't notice, what she's free to do instead (what is she looking at) but she saw Nicole Brossard, what does she see instead - the woman I didn't want to look at - it is still being held in feeling - it isn't being without comment but it is being without the thing to say - it is comment about, I am either alone, or with someone else, talking about the one I'm with. I don't think of the way to say it, that I wouldn't have to find bad.
Vowels What Daphne can do - I'm desperate for enlargement I can't handle - I've wanted to be simple - I need to be able to do more things at once, than I have been able - I could go record Oma (it is her not asking for help that makes her hate). Live on the upper slopes in August
- [first meeting with Laiwan]
That must be. Has she seen. It is young her. Will she find. Bowed forward listening. Not looking. Is she a one. Is she hearing through. Words separately, their whole stilly. She's walking with her tall friend, is she? She is limping, her right shoulder with her bag hung from it, is lower, she's short and fat (I can't see her face, but her small clean teeth are overlapped.) Sitting at the table while he gets - I will - (doing and not ready to be listening) her voice - she nods - I'm saying I guessed - I guessed - and speaking more looking at the table, "I thought you were young, and the lightness was amazing to me" - she's nodding - her careful sounds - "I read in a photographic magazine, you develop it three minutes in Dektol, it is a real black, otherwise it would grey the slides" - the music, he comes back, The courage of Lassie, this is one of - "Did you compose it?" "I was the engineer mainly." The lecture and the competent way she shifts registers: demo. Come to lie behind me in the chair though just touching, purrs. Doesn't when she lies alone. giving off (thanks) or heat lines into my (chest), when I sat straight to feel for it (listen) got on her feet to press it against my back, fur silk pushed across. Texture's immediate though through two layers. At the threshold it falls apart into two. What we call time is an archetypal idea, not yet properly conscious to us. We do not yet know what time really is. Can learn to use a paralyzed state of feeling to cue a switch into for instance seeing. See-feeling is when the feeling I have is what I see the other feeling, but I don't see them feeling it. These mental controls constitute an art private to each. other latents to transition by reading them Was Tuesday the 5th. Daph's book. My near England, knowing the flight. First the pleasure of seeing places, with alertness for distortion, next time wondering more about the discursion, feeling it for the other kind. Yesterday began trying to write something I could put out as about it, the first old question of my own, what else does it have to be, with registering loved place, person, language, thought. Today finding, from something I didn't like, something more complex she was doing, and then finding how seen-through what she reports, often is - and in a flutter, is she tapping into my work; but then, how much was I building on hers, in it - how multiple-y and uninsistently she has her skills brought together finely weighted balanced in it - finely she has weighted the bringing-in to it of skills from other times. Watching: how substantial is she making the patterns, are they light enough? Nearly. What is it with the wings, is that something I don't know. Animals, many animals. Horses cows sheep adders moths foxes badgers dogs dormice pigeons crabs gulls doves roosters swifts (zoo) magpie snails owl crow martin swallows. The idea of plenitude. Timothy rue pinks roses delphinium geranium chrysanthemums (nasturtium) (fern and orchid) gooseberries currents strawberries (oak) briar foxglove clover pimpernel larkspur lupins cabbage lettuce. Daphne Marlatt 1983 How hug a stone Turnstone To be seen actively negotiating in the writing A right balance of active and passive She is always anxious and responsible in it, but it doesn't stop her from writing well. Hearing it with you - you didn't laugh. I felt I was responsible for the long haul.
Standing on the Beaufort Sea. 8th First of commissioned dreams. [Begin therapy with Ellen Tallman] Schoolbus. (A hut from yesterday or earlier, that hut in a camp. I was cleaning out garbage leaving something beautiful on the wall.) One bus for that (high) school. I saw her in there cleaning it after school. Single seats on either side the aisle. Inside I'm seeing (I'm coming to that part) some kitchen chairs set loosely. Across the room (an American) a photograph of two girls, nurses graduating, with coffee (cups). I look back again, I saw Bryn Mawr on the cups, but it's not there, U of Sask under her, looking away. I see it again, Bryn Mawr in some shapes on the cup, not there. The counter I'm in front of has shit on it. A sewing machine table with shit inside, the boys feel free to shit there while the bus is moving, and a pile on a chair. There's some sit under me where I've sat, mine, a flat rectangular smear. It seems alright but I regret I'll probably smell. Over in the armchair corner two highschool girls cuddling with (I don't see them) boys, they look in pleasure, they've been having their breasts felt. Someplace wide - he - actor young man - sings? - a song he made - (death) - I sing a song he made - at the end of some time I (?) the dream - a song - what kind of song - he came out with a country western popular song when he was young - what's his music now. 9 Downstairs hallway curtains on door and window - a straw hat - little objects, many - Sunday morning - I coming through notice she means to keep them there - start yelling and throwing them down - there's a tall pretty girl, I think their lover, lounging among them - a bicycle - more pretty girls - while I throw down objects off the shelves I see she's got them upstairs tearing up my things, smashing, perfume in a box. I rush up and try to clear them. There's many. I grab them, throw them downstairs. Each one is easy to throw but there are always more. Confused labour grabbing and seeing each and throwing it, watching how far it flies, where it lands. When it's almost clear, there's still an east (west) Indian family mother father daughter saying formal goodbye to Rhoda from outside her door at the end of the hall, before leaving by the upper outside door. She's calm in her room. With Kathy Zaugg going up to the village, she says maybe we'll walk up the last part, it will be better on account of the thunder. I imagine a thick grey (in the: ie a heaviness) air. We're driving through the first village past a sort of manure or compost platform. She points to the dead horses in it. It's divided in four, two of the horses, partly buried in manure straw, one still maybe alive, twitching and look at that one, a black furry one on a rope may not be shot at all, prancing on the heap. On the other side grave structures (wood not fences but grove-size structures) painted blue. It's the Nazi color now, they changed from green. Yellow Nazi signs visible among beams. In a floating room with others, look out see a changed relation to the banks, the trees, poplar branches (live) in the water flowing. It's rising too fast. "The tide's coming in so fast!" about a foot a minute. It's alarming me though I know we're a raft and will lift with it. There's a sudden movement, we've shifted back in the channel to where we'd been before. Now I see my disorientation was because we were actually in another place. Reeds in water. An orange skyscraper of the future. They jump into an elevator that's going to stick. It goes up then it goes along - the elevator on a rail crossing up and down all over the outside of the building. I'm watching it going along jerking partly sticking. - "She sometimes speaks as if from a great hurt." "He thought she was very poised." "I wanted to see what it was like between you." - Daph. Learning to move off an instant into a meaning - a something else - and what kind should it be.
Visit to the dead. 'My underworld contact.' 9th Behind Clearbrook looking for the path through, bicycle, indicates along it. Chateau. Through the forecourt looking up, into a window, the chandelier - I've seen this one in Architectural Digest. Their garbage. Box. Wine gallons and two brandy. They make wine. Is there a road going on through? Two workers, gardeners, point through the garden, there are two tracks, I see two grape arches. "If you go through one of them you'll get to " - as he tells I see it, a narrow track over a long mountain ridge - he says about 20% can't manage it - beyond it is Abbotsford - I see it like the Baux The bicycle is alright on the very narrow (like cow) trail. It's a short grass and sharp jutting ridgeway, there panels thrust up, children sliding on them, rainbow slates, many running around. We're back at the chateau in the visitors' areas looking over the wall, at what I know. It's like Architectural Digest. Palm shadows. Thinking what it's like to live that way. There's a visitor's dining room someone has found, the kind of brown crusty egg thing they're taking out of the oven. At a (like fireworks) with Judy. I'm lying down with my quilt. Later she gets part of it over her legs. They're sending up fabric poppies that fly open with dragons inside. 13th
14
Alright, with Doris: The catching of breath with the story of Saul, I read in Kingston in 1967, the catching is with the coming of the sense (she's in his anxiety) that what appears in her is (also at times, can be) his. 1970, I had partly forgotten how she saw him forgetting; Roy coming through as different people, unstable, my anxiety waking next to him; the way she is coming into realizations (not knowing they're his); watching and naming the times and places of the persons he speaks out; she could watch persons transforming a way I can't. Away I can't. Doris Lessing 1962 The golden notebook Simon and Schuster "These two days" - the first, I go to that mouse Monday night after 1. the note from Robert 2. she phones me unable to speak with crying - and after the days of her frozen arm - we wrangle evening and morning, what's different in the morning, front room, is that she seems to be saying she does see the difference of position implicit in what she says she wants - I could go to that because she'd said (what makes it impossible for some women to write well) is that they don't like their position - of all that wrangle that's just about all I can recall, I can't say anything about how she looked or I moved - something of the table, window sill. She saying "I am dominant in some ways," language dominant. I could no longer 'remember' how I had understood that war was working in us all, towards fruition. This kind of detachment. Few people had it. - I offer to work in the back yard. She says a walk. The beach, our voices grinding, I suddenly hear overheard by the bearded man under the shelving cliff. She saying would you still come to me with your writing if we had lovers and didn't tell each other anything about it - see how this writing is irregular recalling it - I saying how much we both would like sexual freedom if it were only possible - but the real question for her, would you do it with men too - "Of course, I'd do it with anyone I wanted" - she is out of focus saying I mustn't deny myself for her - I'm exclaiming I don't do it for her, it's giving up one thing to be able to have another - and get angry saying what about the other deprivation, it's six years since I've been able to have a woman's body in my arms - and in that, am separated willingly, and go away toward the bus. At the corner store want to buy a Penthouse, do buy it, put it under an Omni so only the price shows. The instinct is that I want it. Before I read it, Trudy turns it over. She says are you (in heat), I say I don't know that it's that, but I feel sad that I'm restricted, as when I was younger. She says "You and Jam won't always be faithful to each other, you'll go through it and you'll still know each other." I read especially the forum letters. I don't want to work. I want to go to J's house or phone her. I say, I want to fuck her and she wants to fuck me. Feeling desire I feel strong and clear. I phone her and say can I sleep at her house again on account of the paint fumes. When I come into her room she's laughing in bed at Three's company. I go straight into her arms. She takes me in as if she knows. She says she was crying because who would she find to talk to. I am feeling all over but she stays with the show 'til it's over. I don't mind, am willing to be alone in my interesting body. Lying still next to her my limbs are humming in communication. Kisses are possible. I am longing to get to where she moves in there but I love the sensations of waiting. She says she's full of wine and I'm afraid she may be easily exhausted, or stupid in touch. Sandy phones. J talks to her for an hour. In the last part I am lying in bed visibly waiting. I love the hungry sensation. And also, yes, the play. I had wanted to say, tell me what you'd do to me if you were my husband. I'm being the mistress. When she comes into bed I am no less there. I can touch her neck, other skin, in ways I haven't found, brushes. I want to get her excited enough to match me. I am able to love the shapes of all the kinds of touches. What she does touching my breasts isn't yet profound, it isn't the touch that goes right in, it's a little grey, I want it but I know it isn't getting there. The getting into, the seal, little finger worming, I want just that, but the variance of the rightness of the touch - the touch with the right weight behind it - whole body - the shakuhachi's variance of line, curve of the edge, the overtones rolling forward through it - it's all rapture. At the end the little fat shallow fuck fuck fuck fuck - velvet - I want to do this so much I want to go on doing this I'm not afraid of this this is what I want to do and do. Hugging and cuddling more than is quite true, just for thanks that it's possible, that you really would do that with me. Going to sleep in the other room, waking, breakfast, and I bring out the poem, she loves it, she is willing to talk about its disadvantage, being close to other kinds one wouldn't read, poor and feminist and bad writing. I can say the advantage of being seen as masculine, that I might never be noticed. "You should publish soon. You must do something with Dorothy." The sense of my career, that she's in more, suddenly, because I'm going to see Ellen. It's their other kind of experience. I am sorting at the window table. Go to put the envelope through Ellen's door, we'll see each other later. In some way willfully draw a person out of the house, holding a wine glass, we look at each other. I have an excuse, for myself, the back door eh. Well she's used to people insinuating. ("I could maybe mail it to you.") [therapist Ellen Tallman] Then. All aft waiting for the evening, getting into bed, inducing her into right and left sides. Right side no age, color, time, direction, texture, sound. Her breathing difficult. If you're there what's it like. Symbol, message. Smell - cunt. Left side easier prompt strong warm lying down in warm water, images symbol and eye seen through a keyhole ("spooked"), message the door opening. Forgot to say: at the oven door, she saying what other period of language has been like this - I say Renaissance - she was thinking - I bring out the notes on Elizabethan and Hundred Years War - Richard Mulcaster's "the parties be contented" - I used to flirt - the delight of the language she says his forms are Latin, I say Dorothy's sub(ordinate) clause lumps - "both for the bodie of the tung it self, and for the customarie writing thereof". content all parties, both by whom and to whom the matter is delivered, it seketh both home helps, where there be sufficient, and significant, and where the own home yieldeth nothing at all, or not pithie enough, it craveth help of that tung, from whence it receiued the matter of deliverie. When the mind is fraught with matter to delieuer, it is still in pain untill it be deliuered, and therefor to have the deliuerie such, as maie discharge the thing well, and content What is it - an hour of petting without going in, then she says she'd like a nap - is she being cunning - I'll cooperate - I will be gladly prettily starved - don't be shy - yes worm - it isn't long before she is loving it and has all of her body behind the jointed stroke - (I took my pleasure) the insect legs - and I'm getting soft and dark - lying still without poses - she finds the short fat stroke again - oh - the shift into trust has come, she is going to go on long enough, steadily, I've only to watch it, speeds it some, but it's still right, it's dark strokes like the overtones rolling through (there were pictures of the textures) in or behind them steadily rolling up, the flesh star convulsing in arms like a starfish, it beautifully exactly is contracting, contracting (she says my nipple goes hard) (it has actually come through after so long). I took my pleasure the way I haven't for a long time. In the morning the two short pieces, trying to get something abstract, she says I'm glad you know about that. I say, you can take this as a picture if you want: I imagine it as learning to navigate in outer space. The circuits. She and the baby in the brain, I say as the hand grows, the circuits of the hand and the circuits of the hand in the brain, they are all still there as possible circuits, and maybe parts of the moments of circuits can have relations between them. What I'm trying to make, she doesn't see (I think) but we're on separate tracks then. Scrabbling to the bus stop (without the key) in fever, noticing I didn't take the key, noticing the new moon (clean cold hard clouds), there squatting in the familiar place by the post, wet shrubbery, writing on paper on my knee. Carmichael going to bed the other side of the divider - white beautiful space (face) - shack. Something clothes. I go down to the booking office, am in a long line-up. Realized I would go home again and continue there, calmer, saying "I go down to the booking office." The piles of strong clouds white over blue evening, children, Chinese (the two girls separately in umbrella tents on a concrete doorstep) running behind. I want I want. Lime trees, grass, roses, wet, the look of cleaned air. I am in the booking office standing anxious in a line-up, holding a box of soap (Tide), set it down, it will be a while, boat leaves at 7:30, clock I found says it's 6, didn't know there would be so many, I have to go home between, get my passport and the red and blue bag, remember I don't want to be standing here at all, I booked yesterday, go hurrying toward home but there's a young girl I have to drop off at the Anglican church (social, Sunday school), take her up the stairs, should I introduce her around, see the many young people on the stairs and upstairs - go out crossing the yard and then the road at a crossroads, the shack is on the other side, I find myself crying - it might be because I won't see Carmichael, I won't have time now. Would like to have back more of before this part - Greg and Don both there, something - skiing - Rhoda and who - two have skis and will go on up, two must get some - Don is nearby, I am feeling him watching out in his direction. That in this ("This is the way it should have been all along") coming right there are also a few secrets - whether, when I make a decision not to say something, it is a mind we're both in. Mental controls - closely transcribing - transfixed. Focus in a moment - distance with (Roy) - staying active behind silence, being able to think without writing, being able to move against resistance - having in mind enough similar instance to pick a way - (what's the image - it's being above black water as a spider moves) - I can focus but I can't direct to focus - mobility and command - "be seen composing." 'Feminine' writing - the look of one who listens - sexual listening and sexual acting - in dope seeing inefficient habit, having speed enough to (go around it), move more directly, but being frightened as if in identity, or, the direct moves got me into the fear the slow habits protected. What I said I wanted to work on - (gender and fertility) not being able to see my own writing, fixing, something about the prenatal. The move into the forebrain - dope and yoga - I called enlightenment - being able to see how someone is - the state - rather than feel their feeling as mine - instances, going back to some loved instance, rather than working faster. Forebrain - being able to see how someone is - (being able to move quickly down the line of a concept to cancel it) and move for myself decisively. Dope - the feeling of the quality of something (by the womb or diaphragm) rather than shifting past it as signifier - enjoyment. What I do - remember, transcribe, collate, research in books taking out what I can use, study to come to a sense of what is so. But the being in books and being out there - - I want to be able to see from the forebrain - the person's state - (and something in surrounding - the meanings of the qualities). - In relation to persons I want to be able to see and move, speak through to, move quickly enough to find the location that's true and possible. - I want when I'm with world to be able to see how it works, what anything is. Where am I - (pleasure-displeasure) - what is this - (her working room) - then use language - the effect of this room is - (I need help from another kind of mind) - (phone, she has an idea, my pieces her writing on reading them - I say, and, your pieces my commentary) - theory of reading - from what we did yesterday - I saw myself saying, I don't like this, and saying how I used to like it, and then I got more interested in the (poem) - I saw myself saying, the version I like is this one: I can check with you another time, about the size of the book I'm seeing. Projection results in an intensified fixation. the activated unconscious The tie to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious, is severed. The archetypes lose their unambiguous character in a multiplicity of contradictory meanings. There is now a consciousness capable of experiencing them in their polyvalency. The attitude of consciousness, its stability in the face of the unconscious, "experiences itself, in the self, as the uniting symbol." the union with the soul Increased stability and a lowering of tension. How it also was: she said transfixed, 'in love,' watching wrong things come out of her mouth - the way I put on the girl voice, 'infantilized,' willing to be enthralled in sex, but then next day still able to, more able to, say and show thought.
|