| edged out 7 part 2 - 1983 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
26 August 1983 Flames and sounds. Those who are sexually masochistic have a strong feminine sense of self, those who are sexually sadistic have strong masculine sense of self.
- [Notes from a science fiction novel whose name I have forgotten, maybe Janet Morris Wind from the abyss] "The weathers" 1977 High task and low task Crux a quality of time, "only that the preordained may be done," "no foreknowledge may be gathered" The abyss events that precipitate numinosity or nympholeptic response in the subconscious Draw time acceleration, increased sensitivity and awareness of proximity to crux To peg, to scale down to the moment, to expand the moment, the first step in sorting, "The moment is infinitely fruitful" - take stance Hest to cruise a probability not inherent To manifest, one hests time shape - one shapes matter Deep-reader estimate of basic nature, motivation and any deep emotion Forereading sorting of probabilities, stochastic processing wind from the abyss The task set by the mother and that set by the father Couch-bond Vocation or skill The task of reproduction "I wear my chald of eighteen intertwined chains." 27 Crying in The dispossessed again. Time "the wind from the abyss" The structure of: acceleration, crux What one does: one takes stance, to peg, to expand; one sorts probabilities, following lines ahead.
What that time was, was it great empty time. Why she cried. It must be her - She and I, we began to be canceling our time. How: because what we said didn't hold. What tasks I know about:
Tasks:
Her tasks:
America's:
It was ethical, now it's not. Canada's - this country's, how would I know. Britain's - domination by language. - [I show Rhoda my writing] Loneliness so intense. Because what I need isn't there. I would have given it more. Padding, words that hold back, when thumb covers it. They aren't willing to see possibility of failure, it's doctrine. A title to say what it will be like. "It's very hard to read." "Good." All of what she did to be able to do it, is in it. It will be rejected and I'll find out why. It gives off so intense a loneliness, it is so ghastly alone, it is so near failing, it is so hating and broken. But if someone will like it, will I like them - I think so. "It doesn't slip and slide enough." Chiding - "I wanted to shake you" - it is a structure. Quoting a state. That's a very teenage way to think. She was finding subtle in Trapline, her misapprehension. Being unwilling to know that I go beyond, when I do.
She didn't say the powers.
Someone in the future maybe. What do they mean about this human, they want to see. Two and a half year olds committing suicide because someone has abandoned them. Does she know this is work of being abandoned. Singing
Keeping the sense that it's reenacting but with a witness.
And a piece of work too. Supports - music, beautiful image. I go to talk to Paul about the record player. He isn't home. I meet him in the alley. He has no money, it's Marie-Paule's birthday. "Come upstairs for a minute." He wants to tell about Desolation Bay mountains that could wipe you out with one swipe of the paw. Spike ripples, other things sticking up, Conan the Barbarian and a woman. "I'd like to make a film about their passion." For $25 the armadillo purse. Ugly. I give him $25 and take the record player. When I'm going to Isadora's he is arriving with the armadillo. I refuse to see it. It is more than a month and as if anguish is only beginning. She going over the bridge. Solatry. I'm passing. On the street singing Hey Jude / she walks a-lone, is when she turns to look though it's far across. And then I think: she's going to meet Jam, it's because she's going to meet Jam she had to (get it finished this morning) kill me this morning. And then it's all crippledness and disqualification around me. I take the lot. They don't allow me equal. Staring at her sandal she was wearing to tell me. More than once, what is it about this shoe. If they take Jam I'll destroy the garden, I'll make them move. Then what was her crisis and what was her information. What it was with R, was, her not allowing.
Yes it is going as extreme. 28 The question whether I can go into experience not mine, not like mine, and still be.
Listening to music at night we detach from both intellect and emotion. below this, a single small but vital one From time to time in ordinary human life it breaks through.
moves among the incredible complex of actions and happenings in a state of inner awareness of their meaning There is truth which is perceived by an inner organ. We use many different methods. Rober trouvère I'll meet you on the road. analogy of the infinite successions of meanings transmittable by the same thing Coincidence, "all miracles were things happening in a certain relation to each other" The meaning of it is, things are not what they seem. To extend his perceptions into (the phenomenon). Several different explanations are actually seen to be possible, a refinement of differentiation. Let the miracle be done.
Task is - so to organize himself as to make it possible for the "organ of perception and action" "meaningfully," continually to act. Knowing or being Methodology to organize emotion to fuel being and knowing
The cure is always known to the disease. Release this knowledge.
A part of teaching stands outside time and space. This corresponds to the element in the teacher and the learner which has a similar status. The task of the teacher is in being herself, the functioning of the being projects the meaning. Being carried away by a temporary personality isn't it. so firmly established the habit of alternating personality depriving herself of one of the functions of organic as well as mental life That love is action. "As a friend he is a companion and advisor, provides reassurance and a point of view which is influenced by his perception of the other's needs." If you aren't with me there'll be no one who understands my work. Whoever defeats my mechanisms of assent Their inner circle, centrifuge Said, "You cannot teach by disagreement." Your own mind. In it light is absorbed. Rapid and parabolic, that it has to do with side by side comparison I made it an arc - ie a straight line through curved space Straight line the locus of a point moving in a plane so its distances from a focus and a fixed straight line - directrix - are equal. Focus "a right circular cone"
By means of the tasarruf exercises which clear the individuality, there is an interaction of minds. The series of deaths - abstinence, poverty, "emotional liberation through such exercises as overcoming avoidable --- and playing a part to observe reactions" The rebirth, the transformation which results from them The Lamp has to be experienced as soon as the consciousness is capable of receiving it. Allah is the light of the heavens and earth his light is resembled by a lamp within a niche. The lamp is within a crystal, like a shining star. It is lit from a blessed olive tree, not of the East or West; of it the oil itself nearly shines, without the effect of any fire. Light upon light! Everyone has the faculty, in an embryonic form. It is something connected with eternity. Come, start upon the Way. There is a potentiality in the mind of man. On one occasion it became activated, through a certain form of deep concentration, and was emulated. Without this there is no potentiality for development. The Persian Gulf season festivals: 2nd February, 1st May, 1st August, 1st November. The Painters. "I am a form-making engraver." The disadvantage in learning by the preoccupation with the question of dominate or be dominated. "The inability to make others ---, and the reverse, the fear of being controlled by others," is in the conception of the self. Paranoia. the expansion of the land, the mind a thin line within ordinary life sometimes maintained through the note in music What I want in the home piece:
-
January 1948, "about the 10t, midweek, you got sick about midweek, like flu, fever and aches." She's sitting with her left arm tight across her midbody and clamped onto the arm of the chair, and her right leg crossed tightly in the other direction. "I don't know if it was Monday or Tuesday we took you to the doctor, Dr Gaimie in Sexsmith." Had there been other people with polio that winter? "Very few. There was Joe Shannon in Sexsmith, and somebody else we didn't know. Joe Shannon was totally crippled - I think after." Had you gone to Sexsmith in the time before I got sick?" "Yes, we'd gone along to Sexsmith a bit earlier, definitely within two weeks. When we were coming home the truck quit sort of at the bridge before La Glace. There was quite a bit of snow. I remember walking with you a little more than half a mile. There were ruts. You had some difficulty walking. You wanted me to sing 'We'll soon be done with troubles and trials'." Did you think I got chilled on that trip? "You might have but we were well dressed. " The trucks weren't very well heated in those days were they? "No, that's why we had to be well dressed." _ "We had to explain to you. I had taken your pillow along in the truck. I think they let you keep it with you, so you had something familiar." I was in an adult bed in a single room, right? I remember it. I remember putting things into the pillow. "Yes they had you in an adult bed. You couldn't go anywhere. You were in isolation." "I remember the awful feeling coming home without you. Everything was empty." How was Father in this time? He was mostly trying to reassure me, he was saying 'Maybe it's not that bad.'" "We didn't have a phone, we must have phoned from La Glace. The doctor said, 'Look, I want you to come in.'" "Your neck was stiff - that was one of the signs of polio." "I asked him 'Is it polio?' He said 'Yes I think it is. We don't know how bad it is.'" "There had been talk of Sister Kenny - I think I asked him whether they were doing that - he said no. They said it wasn't applicable in your case." "I asked could we go and see you, he said no, in those days they wouldn't let you go and see a child in the hospital at all. You accept what the doctor says, you don't make things worse by interfering. Doctors do build their own kingdoms, I didn't know these things at all. It would have horrified me if someone had told me." "You were there ten days. I thought they were helping you but they were just keeping you in isolation. When we came to get you you were in a ward with some friendly ladies, you were out of isolation, you were in the sunporch in a crib. You were happy and talking." I could talk English? "You could talk anything in German. Your English was limited." "Then you were home with us until Eastertime, end of March or it seems to me it was April. They said they would let us know when there was a bed for you in the Mewburn Pavilion. In that interval you did learn to walk again. Your leg was stiff but you walked holding onto things. Learning to walk again." "It was during that time we tried to prepare you for having to go away again and that when you came back you would have a baby sister or brother. You were quite excited. I think I let you feel the baby moving. In those days you weren't supposed to let a child know where the baby was." "Your father had to take you out alone. I had to stay at home." (Out of the corner of her eye she sees me using my hand to help my right leg cross the left.) "There were the chores too. Somebody had to stay with me, think it was Irene Konrad. My family had moved to BC by then. I didn't really have anyone. From New Year until you left we didn't get visits from anyone or take you anywhere. So we were quite isolated . The doctor said you weren't contagious but people didn't want to take any chances. I was only, what was I, twenty-three." "I had to go through the process again of letting you go." - What was the reunion like the first time, in the hospital in Grande Prairie? "I can see you in the bed. You weren't lying, you were, yeah I think you were, were you standing on one leg and holding onto the sides. It was a good reunion. You were reaching for your pillow to take it with you again." "It was hard to get you to do much snuggling or hugging. You were full of telling me about what had been going on with these ladies. You were involved with your world." "It was when we were driving home you told me this, that you had been lying in your bed there and calling me and I didn't come, I just stayed in my bed. And the nurses just shut the door." "You said the nurses didn't have laps, only the doctor had a lap. Nur der Doktor hat ein Schose." - "You had just had your birthday when you left. Sort of my theme, the thing that kept me going over the summer and fall, I'm going to see my Ellie when the work's all done this fall." "It was the end of October or the beginning of November. Your father went to get you and you came home." "So when you came home you were very much the professional nurse. 'Lie still! Turn over I give you a needle.' ... 'You kids!' ... Just paw into things and eat with your fingers." "You'd sing 'I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch.'" Do you remember the moment I came in the door? "I remember your lively black eyes. You were like, let's look this place over. I couldn't really expect you to care that much about me or anything. You went straight to your bed. Judy was sleeping in it. You said, 'That's my bed. That was the first thing you claimed." What time of day was it? "I would say sort of at mid-day. I was watching you of course. You were wearing a brace. I had to give you some time to locate yourself back at home. We asked you many questions over the next while to have you tell about it but the things you would tell would be more Eva did so-and-so, these sort of things. You couldn't really tell us what they had really done, that was what I wanted to know because I was still hoping that they could cure it. Your leg was at that point not that much shorter." What was your marriage like then? "Basically there weren't so many tensions. The tensions built up later, more. Then we still had quite high hopes, the war was over, it seemed there was a future. We had one child and we didn't have another one immediately." Was my getting sick the first blow? "Yes it was the first knock. I think gradually the disillusionment came. I think it started mainly because of your father's increasing frustration that no matter of how hard he tried he couldn't make progress financially. [Long story of the next many years.] "Here I was back in what I came from." "Instead of helping the sawmill drained everything and then there were all the broken relationships and then the withdrawal begins. 'Since all of you hate me I'm going to withdraw.' This horrible pressure of all the debts. I had to be mother to my husband. It was more than ...." "He had an agreement with his father that part of the land would be our own land. Your father was convinced that he would never get the title, it was a verbal agreement that is easy to ignore. Then we bought the quarter across the road, the Carney place. When Grandpa died in '74 we paid the money, they accepted the cheque . There was a sudden sharp rise in the price of land ... Bill and Walter ...." " ... '49-'50 and the next year Bartch and Schmidt ...." "My resentment of his lack of understanding for children. He wasn't that insensitive until after. To me his actions were irrational. Temper tantrums. Being so tired , and so that would floor me. I'd do something that I thought would be pleasing and then it wasn't. I would try my utmost to do things that I thought would please him." "His anger had a lot of clout before." "The message I got verbally was to be submissive but the message I got at the same time was how can I respect you if you don't know what I want." "We were suffering it together. If he had handled it differently we wouldn't have had to pay." "For many years we didn't go anywhere to see anyone, didn't see our family. Everyone would be against him."
"What was there to stay for. All his children left the minute they humanly could - such a state of torment. He'd be sitting there on the wood box day after day in deep despair .When I went back to school he thought of it as a possible mobility to leave an intolerable situation. That was a large part of his agreeing to it." 29th Report from the nest. This morning's gentler love. Someone saying may I touch you. I say ask it. He likes the answer. I do too. He knows how, puts his hand over the whole of it. Waiting a while. Going to it with his attention, like to a young creature. I liked understanding that it should be that. Then he makes the coal tent - then puts his finger in once all attention and knows actively inch by inch reading it, and then comes out and says will you kiss me, and I come forward with my hands on his shoulders and do kiss him. That takes my breath to even think. And then puts it in and only when it's there and rooted and moving puts his hands on the breasts and around. What melted through, I could only notice it after (because of reading about it in Musicworks) was the solar plexus knot. It seemed to catch the fuse. Then sitting on the ground in the garden looking at two flat-winged insects, one each at a mint flower head on a long stalk. The small area just at the first stones, and the stone in curly veronica. The autumn patch bergamot mint bugle moss chives (shamrock) yellowing a little ahead in the sort of morning sun it was, warm, hazed and already angled low. Looking up seeing Mary on the path it's an impulse quite gentle and amused, I hug her. Upstairs making tea surprised but of course she would immediately want to know what is this therapy what are you trying to find out and the real question, could I have it too. "But I am mad at you about something" and then yelling about marriage and eventually getting it closer. "You've all abandoned me, what makes sense to me. I haven't had a single wedding," and teasing her, "You're so happy you can't stand it," and getting it eventually to something closer to it. I lied about my telephone, watching how it was. I lied about J and forgot her number, confused it with mine. Then: sitting in the garden she says "Do you get things out of your subconscious sometimes, about then when you had polio and went away for such a long time." I start listening very close. "I never had a hard time with the fact of your handicap but." Guilt and helplessness. She's pressing, I feel she's wanting to know have I found out something against her. I feel wary, I don't want to tell her. I say I feel it's too soon to know anything yet. She says what she felt was helplessness. But I'm watching her voice seeming to say there's more, there's something else. I am suspecting it has to do with the Oedipal and Father and some relief. There's nothing to prove it, that seems what the theory would find. I say I'm sure there's more to it than that but I think it's too soon to know it yet. I'm feeling very cautious as though I could find out immediately, if I moved very acutely, something neither she nor I have known - I didn't have the complete focus, I was partly still down in it and knew I was falling back into another time, using the question I know how to use. "What do you think I could find out, what's the worst it could be." She says "That you're a nothing, that you're not a worthwhile person." A bit red-rimmed. I gather she thinks she means herself. Talking about her mother not seeing her, caring about her, only scolding her, not giving her any attention. Wanted to know what does Anne have that makes her the one. I say they're tuned most the same, their humor, their pride, something about their language. Now - what to make - "That you're a nothing, that you're not a worthwhile person." The letters from Roy and Luke, the $200 for the piano. Helplessness. "Uh-ter help-lessness." Then we sit in silence in the garden. Do I feel something about that, should I feel something about that, is that news. What is implied in this you she thinks of as meaning I. The way she wasn't this time interested in Jam but the way Oma said five people came to see them, "Ellie und ehre Freundin." What's implied is that when she saw me crippled she saw herself unloved, as when I sent Luke away and dream him lost. And break up with Jam and have a sore neck and in the first night of the second time cried for my (a) pillow. "I called and called for you and you just stayed in your bed. The nurses just shut the door." And the January after Luke's birth I end up in an isolation ward in agony that Roy doesn't want to hear my stories. 31st Mukti in orange, her slightly orange skin. The girl who was dubious, her butterfly thyroid was malignant. What I'm wondering is the willingness to lie to M and to write galloping, is it going to make me common.
The air bubble kept moving over the baby's face whenever she lay down to sleep, allowing the child to cry so loudly she was kept awake. September 1st Lying in bed under the window, water in large drops banging down on the sidewalk and garden, the slanted roof. The womb a little fire. Worried today about being held up nowhere, that you're a nobody, not a worthwhile person. Wanting to list have that's true. The body I saw getting into the tub, watermelon quarter bulging out the mid, the really ugly thick thigh. Cashing welfare check in the Chinese bank. (Who am I being.) Confusion, Reich thinking he's got to the universal energy. As she sees - (is it money?) yes actually - 1800. Financially - sexually - professionally - usefully. In hatred and no one phoning, reading four books last night and this morning. I woke raving in Opal and Celie's language combined. Amar: the confusion. What is it now - what was it ever. And: the 'work.' Work a form to believe. Having to doubt. Other work, reading it, The dispossessed, she's working for something. And what does it save - I feel the consequence of disloyalties, abandonment of friends, because abandoning them makes the friendship's time false. And what was it always - feeling the friend has abandoned himself and herself first. My faithfulness with J not useable by her. Was I - yes I was very - faithful if not wise is not good. When they seem to go down. How's it feeling, clash in the chest. The darkness of this day, the cat wrapped purring, flexing her darker ear at the beginning of the sound of the train. I hate you for how you did that crit. I think you know something and when I ask to have something I value valued you don't believe enough to work. I hate you, you're dry ice, you're that sight of the very little panties in the crack under the blind. The way things I love they can't love because they don't know the vocabulary. And then the feeling in this book - I can go to light time space. I do, I will. "For me it was over when you didn't want my letters," and not trusting her advice. The agony attention to what was said to me. October '81. Record of what I forgot, a deadly time. How it looks. I haven't the mastery to do anything sexually, and in writing I haven't the mastery of experience, I haven't the breeding or nerve to make my record worth. Then. What do I want to know. I record instead of learning action. I'm the obedient scribe. A ragged poor traveler confused stripped helpless dying back with every gesture unfinished. Riddington's piece I can't match in range. Wife and children, boat and university. I am not of a family and I am not an unfrightened traveler. He follows the inner path led on by a song he hears in his dreams to the point of death, the ultimate in subjective isolation but also the point of transformation, to find that beyond is a realm where all subjectivities merge. ignorance, failure and chaos Because he understands the intelligence of --- at a more complex level than their understanding of his intelligence, he is able to use their own natures to overcome them just as they have previously used their understanding of human nature to overcome him. this transfer of empowerment the power to understand her situation may use this intelligence to bear on the distortion of a person's path symbolic evocation of the deepest level of cultural intelligence the symbol world
Practicing gestures of thought
- Parts of color, parts of image If there were a way like that to bring it though heard and read language, underprinted image, full image, into surrounded being there Write Robin - Naa'chi dreamers, Na-Khi Tibet nomadic, Na Khi Hopi spirits. Rope of hemp a bridge between upper and lower.
heaven, earth and the myriad things as one body, because it is natural to the humane nature of his mind to do so Reading this essay thinking the one I love still exists but she has moved out of it, and I can if I want re-form it outside her. Joseph Rock The ancient Na-Khi kingdom of southwest China two vols. 3 Tall and pink, the fine silver hair fall, anemone. "Does she ever say what she thinks of / your beauty?" "My daughter says 'I hope I don't look like you.' I tell her 'You'll look like me if you're lucky you bitch.'" "You look handsome and distinguished." " I think she's pretty!" "In the last two ye- ," laughing, "That's a good sign isn't it." "Yes it is." "What are you going to do about it." I'm thinking she's asking because it's her job to." Silence. "A saint or martyr that if I I can't do other things, with things -." Why's she looking like that - struck. This time I've already thought what to say. "What is it?" "I think it's " - the direct address - "people around me that work with materials, my father was an engineer, and I've always worked with human beings." What was like La Glace School, culture shock, constructions of reality out of line with those surroundings. The moment for bringing one of the cultural possibilities into being. My vagina is my medicine bundle. The stories of early experiment and consequence. "Some men" have it hanging by the bed. Things that were alive, things moving. "Don't fool around with that stuff, you aren't old enough to understand it." A red man who comes down the chimney. You see this animal as if he were a person. It was old wolf tracks she saw but she saw the shadow of the wolf in them. For the show. It's already a sense of calling up those who can hear or see certain parts, as I make them. He made those giant animals from the stars that he sent down to this earth. There was just one person in this world. He wanted to put everything together. He traveled along looking for all those bad animals, the giant ones that kill people. He looked for every one of them. Everybody ran away from those giant animals that ate people, but that one person only looked after them. He followed them instead of running away. Saya started to work on the world so everything would be straight for today. Some of the animals he didn't kill. He just chased them under the ground. That is why you can see some of them where there is high ground. the world of sequential sensation and that of a plan held in mind While the trail that a body must follow is necessarily sequential its meaning can only be found in a relational hierarchy permanently coded in the superorganic structure of myth. So event and dream: "systematic transformations of" each other, "within a single overall reality." Reading this stuff I have lurking peripheral sense of the times when I understand in a particular way - like that the moon is the image of the consciousness that goes on through the night - and that will is a perky sensation - ie what a thing is as consciousness. The sea wall. The sensation of coming alongside and having this great body lifting on the right, below - the great body behind its motion - the motion, the quality of motion of a great body, ie small movements with an immense weight in them - it was only small heaving but with what a giant weight. And where the sea wall curved, abruptly commotion, waves striking out where in the straight there's only swelling and dropping, ie seeing the way a swell running along the wall, when the wall curves, is sent out diagonally, meets the swell coming in, slaps together, is shoved back to the wall, crashes, reflects out, meets swells coming in, crashes, rebounds - a noisy confused corner, transducer. The Indian in me - is cyclic - "significant figures in our past return with the return of the seasons" - old wiring. The Indian - the embryo - the paleolithic.
Main thing about Riddington is how he learned to take the parts and repeat them in all different relations to levels of and variants of. Keeping on repeating it and new things come through. The sense of tribe, them, my parents. 5th Yesterday the wind blew dark weather away. The west wind blowing big-leaf trees, gold leaves inside, gold light on the green leaves, light from the west, wind double-live - the green, blue, the rich oiled color blowing east - grass and trees, the small texture still, the big texture shaking from its stems, all hove-over, all standing in the blow. The corner of the park I could see from the kitchen window, late afternoon, what is this color, it's light through air from the sea, is it salt air, the saturation of the greens, grass and linden, those small linden with a large crop, large leaf, central yellow, the cortex younger, hover over, the distance over unnoticed roofs to that corner of the park, a bank down like a liminal, the bank drops down at an angle the sun can still get into, is it grazing maybe, the grass all side-lit, the leaves all horizontally pulled. Blows space into the centre of the tree, blows space for light / into the grass pelt. Coming from the west seeing the cedar by the maples and chestnuts. The cedar this side the big chestnuts, its different heavier movement mesmerizing, underwater parting and closing like fur on a beast's belly breathing, the sea-water compressions, releases. - The beginning of eye delight place love and then she phones wanting to know if - Yelling with T, "It's better if I always disagree," but she needs me to go somewhere with her. Tribal medicine fighting "a discourse"
Dreaming
Mind
Vision quest - the dream precursor
Medicine bundle
Swan person
Monster
- Animals. That animals are sentient volitional creatures like ourselves. The same symbolic patterns in new (colors) and with regular changes in polarity His story is real in the space around him. Wolverine understands his situation and calmly extricates himself. while others strangle in the trap of a reality they cannot be. You are the child of the monster on your trail. seen myself in the mirror as another person to whom one is speaking
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