| edged out 6 part 3 - 1983 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
16 July 1983 "A fire at the door." With Tall[man] - the slow, disguise, ponderous, the great sac under the chin, optical surfaces grey, the mouth stretches ponderously to smile, I go on as if to a person, who does not insist she is. "What was your name when you were young?" Do you prefer to make yourself a reflective blank. When she said "what the fuck it was" throwing back her head laughing. What does it mean to be massive. Do you prefer it. Do you know what it does. (I can't ask what I want to know, I can't think of knowing what I want to know.) Your hands are toxemic, are they. I am the sort of person who to be out would have to be able to push without roughness of resistance. The dream I don't remember but that seems to have said - it was the Valhalla house. Whose gift is to see deformity. There was sorting (clothes) for leaving it, the message seemed to be: talk only in the speech of childhood, I assumed, with her. Inhibited knowledge. I can separate already, something like - it's wrong for a body to be like this - from this is a body of a particular kind, which is the visibility of an experience of a particular kind. I'd have to be watching as I said it, to see how she took it, not look away. The first truth of physical apprehension. I feel two ways about the money, that it's a day's wage for an hour's work and puts the pist [?] into a certain class relation, originates in a class relation, and that someone's attention (time) is their only commodity and should be recognized, the two people's time should be proportionate, ie mine is not so hard won. Getting through would be to be able to challenge without badness. A wrongness of body means a wrongness of experience, system, relation of person and possible world, (except for certain kinds). Can it be useful to you to be under a gun. The anxiety is not about cost but about which funds - 17 "I don't understand why anyone would want to look like that" - "You don't?" smiling on the pillow, "I could tell you but I won't." Noticing her looking at my hands. "How deeply envious she is of your gifts." "She doesn't realize she could have the use of them."
Hatred because of how I'm stopped in their presence. When I see one: I see, that I can't be with that one. 18 the gift sphere to which the work belongs and the market society which is the context The law of the altar at home and the law of the gate for dealing with strangers.
What is the relation of that to the hatred I feel for strangers on the bus and is that hatred only discomfort - is it being seen as - in the music listening room the fluster with the boy who slammed doors - because I felt him seeing me negligible. I will not reason or compare [Blake in Jerusalem: I will not reason or compare, my business is to create.] At the end of the corridor of picker's cabins, a barrier, carpet stairs the grandmother's place. Old woman shows her work - brown (plate), which side is forward, gives it to me like a test, "Can you see anything?", laying it different angles to the light, like brown of (photographic paper exposed) but cel. It's taking me a long time. Another more ordinary woman gets it quickly, I do see something then and when I've seen it, the image (scratched) in white lines, I don't lose it again. On the wall a piece. I'm foggy - not - going too quickly not focusing feeling unable to focus - with these dreams the sense I won't be able to see them clearly enough for anything to come through with the writing down - the writing down cruises over it as a way to have a memory of it at all. The place I'm looking at describing figures On the wall it looks scratched, peeled, off, hand pointing to show something patched off from one place to another, a section that opens back, then raised shell (right). Greenish mottle. An (adjacent) section ghosting in here - (being in a meadow - a fence - looking across - cows? - on a visit). Is it paper, a log the depth of the little glass box, smoldering line across the bottom. Understand it's there very slowly combusting just at the bottom, will sink, very slowly. In space coming into a room (in a galaxy) we hadn't thought was inhabited, someone (we knew before) has (been ill) set up some apparatus (died) (suitcase) (orange uniform). From the 'writing' when I'm looking at (some part of) the dream, to the written, when I'm reading it back, what has happened - the solidification I felt - imagined it a part in a piece of writing, it has things it does. And again - "the solidification I felt" - it was a different voice, it was a voice - if I'd written with its spaces it still is missing the thing referred to - which is those little pictures, A (joke machine) where toilet paper rolls onto a shirt front being ironed (that's the meaning of the shift across (type shift), for a wooden manikin chest and head (some hat or uniform), the toilet paper rolls out on very beautiful tweed, but knocked over, the creation of the shirt is interrupted. It's shreddy. What she was calling language - a line of tensions and relaxations - I thought suck / suck - she was saying, the wavelengths being pushed from one sense into another. The rainbow, (not its color but) that it isn't there, hangs in an angle. I think, make an order now: Feeling compelled, going down, the fence, she unusually (is it) is setting me to defer, keeping on in cheerfulness, I say we might find Luke's cup, the rotten wood, "I've found it", Jerusalem two cups, one of the pair was lost, her dream, when I'm on the porch and she has the shovel with worn-down edge, finding the cherry pit tree, I was supposed to have four babies of my mothers', I only had three, we wondered where the other was, I turned to look at the ---, Trudy had had it, it was a big strong round-faced baby, exposing nice well-rotted soil Carol made, leaves and seaweed, took years to rot. I finished it by writing our four names, and that's the end of the story. Turquoise blue and red-eyed, carrying the wheel in plastic, laugh, she says "You look nice there!" down to the one in the ground. And what she - these two colors - "Do these two colors clash" - "No they look very nice together" - and then from the other wing comes Trudy in visiting clothes carrying a parcel and a rolled rug - laugh - T telling her dream to R, J telling her intention to me - exit upstairs, I, making tea, wondering have I been got out of the way, huh, listening how long it will take, she chooses to set herself on a chair, "But you seem a little freaked out," but I'll take your word for it, she sits nearer and is on the way to visit someone I thought she should know.
19 A separation from - outside the door hearing him (her) tell someone else how much he's missed the joking easy warming sexual qualities of Helene, with me - face him with - "She'll flatter and manage you," bitterly, "and you'll like it but after a while you won't like it at all" - (from awake he's Freddy Nijland). I'm thinking I'll go away this time, maybe to New York, coming into town, the old hotel (hospital), can't remember my room number, am going back and forth with ---, but have learned to roller skate, the sideways pressure, a theatre block with some coming out of their doors - after a long while wandering looking into doors I ask a chambermaid in a room that was like mine - I had put my things in it but not paid rent for (years) months, would my stuff be there, it was everything up to a certain time, letters, clothes, if it is all gone it may be alright - I have recent stuff - she locks up and takes me up corridors - I only had to describe - I went to New York, I thought I'd only be gone for two weeks but I was gone months - I think we're going to where we put my things - another door had old grey cobwebby luggage set outside it.
PREDICTION [Jam talking about my writing, don't remember which poem] "There was writing before that, that was really so clear and brilliant." "Does it address my reading sense." "I don't want anything to do with this poem." "A system that doesn't have anything to do with me." "I don't want anything to do with this." "The movement in relation to what I feel it addresses" "I don't want to have anything to do with this movement of it probably because it's against me." "The writing feels it's in control of a white power, a clarity." "Somebody is trying to pull something over me." "Trying to gain power in a gendery way." "Trying to control quite effectively." "I recognize the shift to a superior position." "A slight inaccuracy that is very powerful." Do you really think of it as a forest still. When you speak slowly is it from another attention. Can I close my eyes. Do you think there is anything but projection/reflection. One has to work with this value, in the country one is exploring. Can I doodle. Laing, Winnicott, (Marie-Louise, Jung, Campbell), Freud He had attained a form of cognition which like a directing beam, gave him a sense of certainty it was something as specific as if one had actually touched an object living in different dimensions at the same time a man who is swimming across a lake; a man walking down a hill has three frameworks of belief an Outward and an Inward: they do not operate together, though they work consistently in their own dimensions. Balances of Work, mizan el amal The first plane is when he is like a moth. It has sight but no memory. that there is an urgent undertaking in life Teaching - A man, never having seen water, is thrown blindfolded into it, and feels it. When the bandage is removed he knows what it is. Until then he only knew it by its effect. the elephant in the dark the vision of the Sacred Heart faithfulness in association with others is an essential of this task Almost algebraic production of words from a three-letter basic form The Near Ones.
21 Actors. They invite me to join the acrobats. I want to accept with pleasure, realize I'm to be the token crippled dancer, leave. Dear dreaming will you begin to be clear. Yellow and white kitchen, porch wires alley moon summer triangle, the light on the sage bush, the sunset light that passes through two windows to fall in the garden. "Rhoda saw it." 22 Urgency I must go there - the fine flushed face but not much to say - the library puzzle - bitter squid - his horoscopes - Remington Steel - ice cream - she cross - don't heat the milk - (putting the bowl on the floor, garlic on the sill) - food in the bedroom - there is something feeling very bad ("I don't know what my relation to it should be") as if she's in fantasies about it that she won't admit to, and if she is, am I doing it for her, and will it make my show impossible - that today I was imagining a place for - and that it could be an essay - and I could be a philosopher. [many pages of ml and mr words]
[Ellen] In her nice long skirt foot on the hassock or leaning forward with her arms under her breasts, fine silver at the crown. The clock spoiled. Doubt and fear, Maggie gave, distress of being dirty, belly rotting, will it be a time ended, it's (7 years). She said it was interesting up to when I came to Vancouver. [She had asked for a written biog.] Doing nothing today - eating lying down, uneasy about she.
Wanting to read magazines or watch TV or eat, unable to read anything I have to put mental energy into, being out of money, having gone off from J unable to balance. She phoned thinking I'd be going to ET, I thought she was just wanting to see me, and was happily patronizing, couldn't work all that day, went over and she when she saw my bag was sorry, and then spoiling her octapus, and then cranking, then I took it to ET [Ellen Tallman], her curiosity and something else, I was feeling very bad and squeamy about something slimy in her, I know she won't admit, then when I'm at the top of the slide upset her voice was cleared. I'm suspicious and quite miserable she's really departed from me, and feel she wants to sabotage my lucidity with ET, or that it's for her I'm doing it and it will take all my money and so it sabotages my work - in the contradiction having no sure accusation - "It has changed already," meaning what I did have to say, you were in love and now you're not - and when you were I was so flying - you don't have time now - do you know it was that? Needing the other person's pain - is it that. glowing with the astral violet of the underlife - The doubt that these ways of learning will lead me further into the stance of not-knowing so that even the ways I do know, not knowing that I know, will be taken over. By contemplating this space we may be able to open up a level of relaxation and satisfaction. Coming in alertly tracking it into and out of Surfaces can appear as such and still be transparent. crowding, confusion, weariness and failures to communicate well Conscious experience is usually thought to be a function of systems that cannot themselves be part of the content of that experience. Knowing is primary and the unknown results from stances of this knowing - embodied as the familiar pair, knowing and its objects. greater liveliness, clarity and intimacy Thaw out the near. the particularity and precision of the surfaces as shining outlines Move through them. 26 About Daphne's book - the uncomfortable graces of introduction and explanation - it has to be done? No it doesn't, the discomfort of public tone. Reading feeling the differences of public and intimate tone. "Two living letters in reply, to single I's with Canadian accents." What makes me uneasy about that. It's a play I don't like, it's for whom, another kind of person - it's immoral, a person isn't a letter - retrograde, who does it look back to. I want to write a small piece on what it's like to read How hug a stone. Discomfort of alien diction in what's often close. Words one doesn't like. How personal is it. Calling ice floes crazy paving, that's public diction, it's fast language. "Dense with intrigue," "in all that jazz." Not being willing to use certain phrases, these are phrases not single words. Fed a line, swallowing the line of event, the way a journey is - wrapped. The alternative. What suspicion of an alternative. "left open, flapping, wide to the wind"
What do I suspect - space - there's a way to locate so - Earthworm - in the tunnel - constricted
Technical achievements - having passed through the voices saying writing isn't living, you must be seen to be reworking what comes to you as if you own it No. My skill is 1. in finding/making my way into a life that can be written without cover, 2. navigating the moments themselves, of that time, as they are, so that what comes is attentively met, in balance, with the whole range of skill, 3. remembering, recall, resolved, patiently without generalizing, without short cuts, and registering, riding the time reentered, 4. and then the multitude of balancings that make it possible in this world to publish writing many will not be willing to follow, in competition with writers who are more easily willing to ingratiate. 27 Came kissing but without bridging. Did I start grinding? No. She wanted to talk about Cathy and Paul and did and I got enraged and didn't separate it. "Obsessive." Am I enjoying this? to myself without thinking to say it, ensnarled. Yes, the wrangling, except when she - what are you getting even for this time? She only wants to ride me down. SPEAK THROUGH. Times when I've ridden her down. What's this about Sandy? "That Sandy should be told." She would refuse to learn from me, that's the cut-off for me. That was interesting: the times when someone shows up competent in the other's field. "With students I would catch myself rearing up." One doesn't let them pass. "I was feeling terrible and I knew there wasn't any way you were going to admit what it was that night."
Intense queasiness, paranoia - the presence of a lie - maybe some charged inclusion - a distress.
- my having another source Where a thing has a settled meaning - dissolves something - into the under which is where - Hillman. The difficulty about what of what is written, is recognizable as writing.
- At the Universal Buddhist Temple. I thought, a shower, and there was one - her caution and then interest - thin voice chanting, orange clothes - ballerina. [first time at an advanced yoga class in a temple in the south side of Vancouver] In the breathing - the plateau of held breath - it's experiencing alternation, I was noticing ---. Looking for what to do in meditation, thought, a point - can't see it and then when it came to me, an actual star, at its distance, in its black open, I could love to hold myself toward it, and came into - Evening - we rub each other the wrong way - wanting to be comprehended - is it that - "take it into my body" - "We can't afford it" - "I'm crying because I had to tell you." "I can't touch her." So what have I done - I insist she should come to know what she wants - What do you want, in that voice - she: "I don't know." I think of it as such an achievement to counter her at all, that I don't dive right under. "She should beat you up." Should I go there. I don't want to. When she drinks - I should be thinking of nothing but: what is she saying to me now.
PRM. L approach, R avoid - maybe. "Emotionally responsive" to another person's simulated emotion. Larger and more bulbous corpus callosum, asymmetry at birth. A computer that can 'absorb' background electrical noise. The most powerful juvenile feature - a brain large in comparison to the body. Gravity program. A larger brain could need a larger body to feed it. Right body / left brain sequence, language. Left body / right brain space, vision. My lightness her suffocation. Her ease my sadness. 28 Sentics. A shape in tai chi. Clynes. Engram. Essentic form. Spatio-temporal forms "like keys" "to communicate qualities." "Moving like a spiral between languaging and being." Head lifted slightly, a certain expression, tension across forward and upper part of head, sideways expanding pressure in temples. Body seemingly becomes light. No anxiety, trust that a new idea could be in the right direction. Not being afraid of the implications. Time forms that are solid and true, as faithful to the body. [Ellen describes herself as] The daycare worker - she touches her left shoulder - to look after the crying child, or children, while you integrate what's visionary experience, what's ---. "Forebrain - it has to do with - inference, it's like a new computer that works very quickly, it gets to information that I haven't been given. I think my father has a notion of it, undeveloped." "She might convince me that my feminine brain really is inferior to her masculine brain, and then I'd stand cancelled." "Oh, I see you really have taken on for yourself the essential form of the gender question!" - [notes below from Manfred Clynes Sentics] As truth transducer we are part of the system of interacting inhibition and excitation by the nervous system that produces white. The functioning of the subjective can be shown to be subject to the highest degree of order and precision. What the 'timeless' is. Precise reality of forms in time has escaped language-making. Each sentic state has a characteristic inertia. Is expressed by a modulation of motor, an algorithm specific to that state. ('Essentic form.') (Also Wheeler? And Xenakis.) Genetic program for recognizing the song, was there with the mutated program for producing the song. Crickets. Field in physics describes the integrating property at a point in space, of adding up contributions from various individual particles, so that individual contributions cannot be identified, only the sums. our physiologic design To be able to tell the order of the letters needs to be 0.2 sec. Birds and insects.
Revelation - grief - love - hate - joy - sex - anger. Slow - fast. To play naturally - 1. to listen inwardly with utmost precision to the inner form of every musical sound - 2. and then to produce that form precisely. Less than a 100th of a second, precision of a 100th of a tone. Approximate, judge and classify very different from pure, which is recognized. By a differential equation, a particular solution or eigenvalue of the equation. Allow us to construct a vector space of the emotions. The construction has a butterfly shape. Each symphony created a world in which he was. Sincerity as precision. Emphatic mode - viewed and savoured - control of intelligence - switch voluntarily - easily move - sentic fluidity.
Debussey - communication not through producing sentic form which is only quoted, alluded, suggesting environment. full bodily involvement and spectator-like viewing Unitary form of existence of the person "a point". Insofar as we willingly permit another being to live within us, we also apply to that one our own forces of self-preservation. Wonder at touching the entity: it doesn't give advice. The ideology of a person may be stored and take part in unconscious processes. Two systems of the nervous system involved: one produces rock-like stability, the other feels every nuance of essentic form. Eg stable spatial orientation and sense of changing. The after image - experienced as stable in space with respect to the head - a second, oval, dark 'screen' it is projected on. The shape of this pulse form - if it has it the intimate experience of the presence of the composer. Will continue for a certain number of pulses after the last sound. Inner pulse works as a matrix. Which can allow some and not other. The inner pulse must be there to provide the personal presence. the manner of growth and decay of each tone
Beethoven in mid-career universal and still spirit. Late - uncoupling the motoric, the inner forms dance. Identification of the who with the universal. The point of view of it incorporates the precise transfer function, the mathematical relationship of what has been called satori. We experience that. We exist and are at home. simultaneous experience of energy and peace. The active and resting phases of the inner pulse telescope differently at different speeds / tempo. The change from one pulse to another - a stumble.
Schumann - special intimacy, a gentle touch to the inner core, suspension and tension - each new one a gift. A state allowing certain processes to occur though what is felt is just a readiness. "Searching combinations are taking place." Affect is matrix of dream. 10x name - to father like 'love', son and Love is facilitated after grief. The order of sentic states. Love a steady state of flow from within the torso out to limbs and through neck. Anger - body being torn apart. Virtual images programmed in. so free of hostility and aggression and yet so full of vitality, one wants to love them - Wheeler - mutability of laws "sufficiently extreme conditions" Each law, mutable though it is, is derived most compactly on first analysis from an immutable symmetry principle - that hides the machinery that makes it mutable. A gigantic structure of observation, theory and experiment "to bind this work together." Fluctuation of density from galaxy to galaxy are idealized as smoothed out and the geometry of space is treated as homogeneous and isotropic, curved equally in all directions. "Einstein gave arguments that this bending should be great enough to curve space up into closure, making the geometry that of a 3-sphere." 3-d analog of 2-sphere of globe. If there is enough density "final cosmological singularity." Time parameter so defined that light rays run at 45o angles to the diagram. 3-sphere, N pole is beginning, S is closure. The man who goes up the mountain - show that at some point he will be at the same point at the same time. the lesson of gravitational collapse into any more What the science attitude is, "underneath must lie some deeper structure." the pregeometric structure underpinning space some mysterious coupling of future with past, require the future observer to empower past genesis conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought, independently of its being observed that an observation is only then an observation when one can communicate the result to another in plain language day when one sees much more clearly than one does now how the observations of all the participators, past, present and future, join together to define what we call 'reality' The simultaneous two-direction braid. [sketch] - Horse and rider gait/gate - I saw who horse and rider are by the sensation of movement. That J has nearly nothing on the R, hard to breathe, but L - eye through keyhole - "spooked".
Language - dictionary delight Andrea Dworkin - the content easier than no cap [she writes that it was easier to get radical content past a publisher than the decision to write without caps] Hungry for a theory "I'm beginning to see what your landscape is like." Penetrating blue eyes, unbending will, Mr Muir, fear and love, "Women are afraid of being overpowered." Should I write your story. The sense of inferiority from not having pleasure. I am agreeing with you, an Oriental man would be nice, slender like a girl, nice skin, soft mouth, he'd like pleasure, know how to bring it, that ember touch, and have a little stalk too, for after. And having gone so far into pleasure I'd be - but you don't let yourself go in it either. By recognizing enmity I am more interesting to them, erotically. The way I know, and she does not, envy, ill will, punishment. The function of knowing.
Tai chi - a single body is "constantly changing with respect to the void" by ceaselessly differentiating - inside/outside, time/timelessness, "where the partner is space." Trying to begin from the point of view of one who looks back from the security of a time when it has been achieved, is looking back. role of the dominant hemisphere as the more aggressive in control of the motor system. It effectively controls access to the channels of communication ( inhibit the right hemisphere) and undoubtedly initiates the greater part of volitional activity etc Dream, universe and language
the special sexual needs which are rarely conscious overcoming of incestual fixation and infantile sexual anxiety Confusion Breathing and anguish associated forever
[Ida May Gaskin I think]
2 August The confusion of this writing question and my ways of thinking, trying to - what, trying to be impressive enough, trying to separate myself from what is against me, trying to see what it is. J that coot sulking in her big house. She's got little stretch. Comes out in beautiful love but the retraction is so disarrayed. Thinking about something - I wish you would, but are you, I don't think so, I think you're punishing me for saying I'd be as if you're out of town, while you finish your construction. And because after that sexual opening I closed myself before you were ready. silence on the objective level Structure then becomes the only possible content of all knowledge. This structure is always simple and can be given to children. [Korzybski] Unuseful generalization, shock of what was left out of the abstraction. Taking words for things, forgetting what language is. Delay for silence, delay for cortex.
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Blue white and silver Once a feeling is disconnected from the knowledge of what it is, it becomes false knowledge. We make things symbols for the pain. It may be a matter of physical distance kept from the physical center of the pain. Sex, pain and pleasure centers close. -
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- The new little Sharp. [clock]
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