| edged out 7 part 3 - 1983 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5 September 1983 What I'd like - the right work name.
"She plays all the parts." A triumph over the conflict which had obscured that identity in her younger years
7th Dinesen I am pathetic and fail myself easily these days giving in after a moment. That's her.
Reading Thurman on Isak D hating art. Hating that 'writing' is in the journal where I need to do nothing but - where I should be alone. ET and narcissism - but what is it, whose. What it was - Since that session, since hearing J's voice? quite desperate again. The identities canceled as I go. These garbage pages. It's inward clashing, evoking trouble times and being in them again - what else, a disturbance about T, and R, as if I should move, gladly would, I should figure out what to do, the situation - a woman near 40 who limps has a distinguished head but looks anxious, alone again, is not successful at writing, is not successful at photographs - I have to get away from these people - if I do - there is a sense of forcing myself to stay here - I have to get away from these people - they've surrounded my house - why - it's a good house I found - where - then. Money - how - no 'personal' relations - he goes somewhere every winter. From feeling to make the show and include everything to this heart-shocked withdrawal, and that I can't go anywhere until I work through them. Pinned. What was the dream - Cheryl - her birthday was - she and Lorraine going. As if missing Cheryl, what connection can she be pulling, as if I heard her downstairs. Suspicious thinking every connection is cannibalistic. Can I go on the road again - red yellow blue green - and be loved and admired somewhere and walk in new landscapes, not bitter. If I haven't learned writing with her it was - I am never willing to really say I've failed - some of my strongest years wasted. Letters I wrote weren't answered.
8th The mass of writing that when its love for J is taken out of it will show as nothing? Pressed to find something to do - reading about the new university students - Jill's [Chisholm] face in the Times, family - a career, what career can there be now. The notebooks and what they intuit.
The form to talk about what I'm coming into and how to study it. Lessing's middle life. 9th Sighs on the bicycle, beautiful sighs. Am I lighter and brighter passing the schoolyard. RRING - The garden this morning spring in winter with new planting, hollyhock, rocket, wallflowers. The place found to sit still by artemisia, sweet cicely, angelica, Japanese anemone, sweet william, fern, a place at the foot of it. Is it getting sore now - The bull, the steers. Becoming the cattle. 'Unconsoled.' She had realized some and even looked up the Mennonite anarchists. "It must have been hard for you": about house and family. How few realizations there'd been. "The beating wings of desperation and confusion." I don't remember very well what we said. Afterward connecting them. I hope you go on forever every year realizing more of what you've lost. And still letting her off the hook - not saying what I deeply don't forgive. "You don't think I can hold that firm?" "You could be that self-spiting." Not saying: this time it isn't self-spite, it's an uprising between the eyebrows. And who's crying is someone. The pleasure of writing a suite of dreams for someone to read. My dreams are loving to entertain us. "Do you really think you're nuts too or are you just being -." "When I look at all the letters to you and everything in the journal directed toward you, how much there is of it, the beating wings of desperation and confusion, it does seem crazy to me. It's too much for anyone." "I would have had to always be there." Silence. Being proud of the dreams, thinking I'll soon know what they are. A night of television, having given the dreaming enough to work with. Isak Dinesen, the way Denys died by a stroke of her claw marvelously when he didn't help her desperation. It was worth syphilis to get to be a baroness, the world being what it is. The pact with the devil, that everything would be turned into stories. I feel I'm ready to take the material further. This morning one slide and move something through it - it was the cemetery - while something is read, a light rolling through to illuminate. Take slides at slightly off angle - maybe. The stress of self-feeling, vanity, uncertainty and mortification, foreseen and shunned. The idealism, simple languages set themselves up and after them the complex things referring to them. Marrying, the companions. So that what happens outrages the initial power/longing but is in itself interesting, forcing. Instead of self-holding, turn it out, see who criticizes and manage them or confront them. Every neurotic thing interrupts an excitement. Self-pitying or punishing - who do I want to - who wants to do it to me - who do I want to do it to me. That the skeleton can stay but the flesh has to be new - I understand that - the skeleton is [sketch of geometric simples] etc. 'The foundation.' The time foundation. 'A year.' The founding year. Fontanelle. 'The unconscious can be reached only by symbol.' What's the relation of symbol to the forms. (Archai.) From dreams the sense that everything met is also being taken as (symbol) which is - as a quality or experience or psyche. What will clear it is a strong and profound sorrow.
Telepathy - glance sets up - send message on a stream of love. Make yourself impersonal and watch the pictures. The adequate form of speech is speech that draws near. This nearness is only made by vigorous exactness. withdraws the thought which is nearest to speech, or from which he speaks, toward his interior thought, and abides in that. When therefore the man now a spirit is in this state he is in himself and in his very life, for to think freely from his own affection is the very life of one and is himself. When you see what is lacking in another you concentrate on forming it in yourself and then pass it on, maybe in a material gift. Those who censure others too soon and are obsessed with their errors, have only one nostril. Whoever does this work right become attractive to everyone, has a correct judgment, is in harmony with all, wise and useful in speech. - alone came out from the circle of the forbidden full of fear and awe, went out and cried ah! to all creation. If it asks in you, what is the source, say it is your origin and what calls you. Then with both eyes one illuminates the house of water. The releasing of the effect is in the two eyes which are polar. if one closes the eyes and reverses the glance and looks at the room of the ancestors 10th With waking the --- the --- the emotion of the dreaming is given by the drumming of rain. 11th After a sore dream wanting to write down what's impossible with J - in a list - the dream of the child learning to play with a sword - her equal dazzle with any girl - the way she didn't acknowledge the compass - her brutality when she had R and T in her house - her sado putting into uncertainty - that she doesn't know about fostering - the idea she has of herself - her confusion - that in the end she was willing to try to use racism against me - (helping along the growth of anything, to keep alive within oneself, to feed) - that she wouldn't do her work of thinking about. The way her medicine has been failing her - her fatness and lack of care - the way she counts on being able to impress. I had to be in her scheme scene to be held by her writing - I am really out aren't I - I hate so much of her writing - the choppiness of it - and strain - condottiere - mercenaries - Rulag, I'll be her public enemy - on the other side of a drag - the strains I've been holding - it feels like the top of a hill - what was the strain - holding away from this letting out of breath? - why - I was held - what did I think held me - that she could touch me genitally though in no other way - amazing how little presence in her touch - but the holding hands - that she could read anything I wrote in her way of seeing it as - what - a sequence of spirit quality - liking the little tag for Robert and knowing it was love - her ungirlishness and difference - the islands of virginal sweetness, like no one - unusualness of take, being able to be seen in an exotic seeing. This is seductive - get it closer - she'd comment, ? - as if - is this her sword - she'll use the imagination of the foreign? - no - with her family - she'd put one into a lovely world of finely resolved perception - the colors of it though are I think mine - ie I don't know hers - I won't be like Sandy cutting her down out of jealousy - feeling quite friendly to Sandy - she created herself quite a warrior - and then equally the bewildered as though it's by taking from sense she gets ---. The strain of how much was indicating against our join - her brutalities - the way I couldn't be with her family - my isolation - the long time and big war it would take to get in touch after even a little while - not liking her relations to other people - not liking her hands - the whole body not being able - that her complaints weren't to the real violations - her crankiness - the wideness of misunderstanding. What was indicating for - the way it was with my family - the early visions - the sexual bondedness - that she didn't lie and cheat - the ways it would break through extraordinarily for me - work I'd do in abandonment by her - the writing after I'd been with her - that she loved up north - that she'd read what I liked - her objects and cooking not offending - how she would hear music. Holding the mass of contradiction and it not leaving me free in the way I was already last night - after the gospel movie - to be noticed - I've been hugely oppressed holding all of what she doesn't admit - which now is free to happen, released. I did hold a very complex tight structure for the sake of the little breaks out of it. And why am I stopping. Because I can. - I've been looking for this a long time, a hole in the sky. The sky is a kind of spongy material. The door papered shut, drum, opening it for a movie. Being frightened of it: putting the circle into it: candle light, the warm chimney. - and then to risk himself beyond such seeing, such hearing as he discovered possible, and try the finer labyrinths opened by touch, smell, taste. In the time 1978-79 was in pain about:
In this summer:
18th [after a week at a Zen retreat at Harrison Lake] Waste no effort in reversing the wheel of cause and effect.
Not impersonating While we are alive let us explore it. In-breezing, out-to breezing Did he seem to be saying there's a way to be that's a (unified field) without objects. Stop objectifying yourself. "Just sewing" with wet bright jumped in the eyes when he said yes. "I wanted it to be that." After the afternoon sitting when I was feeling what I could watch, pictures on the floor, in the dark, I could watch them change, happy when I could see that face again smiling.
When forms had begun to show. The trees by the highway silver and gold glittering, bowed over. Waiting in the car the stand of beings bowing and stirring. With them, in front of them, a small one in stems and glints. "Buddha is yo hus ban." The smiles into faces I was looking into. Pink stems, gravel, water, boy behind stairs, singing is there, women on balcony, "the winding tree" she says. Sal, Trudy brush cut, Joann aside, talking to them not her. The woman having the baby, dress with a divided skirt. The baby is very strong pulling herself to her feet at 2-3 months. Going through the room, the poor pale girl on the floor calling out, her slattern mother asleep. Pick her up, she'll come with me to see Sal's movie. Coming into the room a small animal comes toward. On the screen the first shot the road through Sexsmith. I say to J, "That's the - do you -." Overlays, short shots. In the train sitting with my friend each with a child in our arms, across from us a couple, fat, married. Looking in the window to see us reflected, a couple with children, the way we're sitting, my friend short dark brown hair, young woman, surprised she's got on lipstick. I'm looking to see whether it's me who might be looking like the daddy. "I'm glad we've got girls." A store on the corner burned out. Squashed pop cans. Traveling looking for their truck. Is that - green truck with box. Coming to the campground. Will there be bears. Sleeping on the ground at night. Carrying four pillows come to their bed made on the ground, the bear in the middle, young black bear. Set out the pillows, them on one side, the bear is on this side. 20th There isn't time for everything. Will I learn feeling goodbye. And is that the death they mean. As: the bowing poplars, when I write and tell is it because I haven't felt the parting. The people I've held myself wanting toward. [table correlating qualities and people I've been involved with Qualities: delighted, sensitive, proud, willed, focused, laughing, skilled, alone, framey body, sexual body, brilliant, same perception, impious, dark-haired, intelligent, quick, perverse, soul hungry People with highest totals: Cheryl, Trudy and Carmichael at 11/18. My carelessness and the longing to be focused. The relation of delight and pressure. The body suddenly changed, lighter, can get knees to floor, headstand falls lightly to balance.
The one who is in front of me is what I am as a person. I want to have in front of me what I want to be, as a spirit. Already am what they say to be: that I am what is there, only I don't speak to it as if it is myself. Falseness. Not to objectify, not holding to the form of human.
The process of the idea of oneself
To manifest true self with social world, to manifest true self with personal relations, to manifest true self with objects To manifest true self as absolute center of gravity The sense of symbolism in the sesshin time, suspecting the ceremonial of patterning instructions toward I hoped alertness, knowing. The alertness and breaking through of Friday and then the absent-mindedness, spaced-outness of Saturday - being lost in thought but how differently - being attached to the blissedness. What was different and how was it made
But not able to wake up.
Taking off the jacket to rely on only the original I The ki brimming from the navel center which all beings have from the beginning, which upholds them. It is the same in all. It is called Buddha nature. Turning back the light The field of this universal shining is a state before illusion or realization have appeared. No thought arises: if one can come to this original state, it is called Buddha nature. Living beings all twenty-four hours are being used by the thought of passions and going against what they are. The great satori and the great piercing through With that agitated mind seek who is agitated. Taking the search back: to void. Hearing a sound take it simply as sound. With great courage turn the hearing back until hearing comes to an end. When that one comes to the state before sound is uttered, before forms have appeared The ten thousand things and I are one body. What is not illusion is the true being of each. Every day go into the great quiet where you belong. Face the other way and turn your gaze back.
"I present the gate by which all the Buddhas of the three realms come into the world. Unless they go in they cannot come out." The nun cried with great force "He was born quietly last night." She caught hold of the teacher and put her hands round the top of his head. Bring the weaknesses up. The strong points distorted by using them to recover. The effects show themselves in any small movement. Into that overmind thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water. The passage is pain - it can be thought of as centered in head - sex - "or placed like a fetus in the body". Vision of the womb or love-vision. "The majority of dreams vision of the womb." The minds of two the same. Your name is Fat Bum Woman. 24 The way dream and waking are the same is the way they are recalled. Dreams do circulate into present, other times. Updating its structure, restore and renew childhood. "Formal and emotional connections." Ie look and see what kind of connections there are. The activity of this mechanism is computation not communication. Massive infrastructure. The permanent memory is indexed associatively. Short-term. Day residues. Nondreaming sleep is processing it from s.t. by matching and superimposing. The common element stands out clearly, the rest is vague. Blink comparator in astronomy. The concentrations: checkers with Ed, volleyball - grade 12 - that one time dancing - last-light papers - childbirth - heading broccoli - acid - early dope - throwing pots - singing in Paris - singing with the clarinet - early with J - Sexsmith by the end - Valhalla evening - taking on Ed - Oxford day - cooking, Slave Lake - the last lovemaking and some early - at times writing with C and T - seeing with Tony - baseball - reading - Oma's house and garden- the choir - hit parade music - touching Frank - Greek sunset - that traveling year - being at the creek - after leaving Peter, in London, Tolstoy - in Dorothy - the last year at home. Jam's hearing and touch and reading sense - Trudy's attention - Roy's play - Tony's uprightness - Rhoda's made things and body. As much as I have at times known - Regarding it as being - being in love with what I see, color - hearing birds' speech - smelling the chicken in the egg - seeing the Assyrians - the sense of Persia in lovemaking - imagining the tendril - the photograph of the meeting - saying to Josie - the mouse - the starry night - thinking many moves ahead in checkers - rapidness in the broccoli - seeing the dancer - seeing the bathhouse for Trapline - with Barry seeing through to his fright - the close concentration and confession of early with J - seeing the rapidity of C and T - talking with Luke in Wales - the Wordsworth seminar - driving when angry - as beautiful as when first in London - and on the day in Oxford - the care of the relation with Tony - Dispossessed - the end of The golden notebook - writing the challenge of father - the reading of that story and sequence - the night of her birthday - seeing behind the curtain - something about Penelope - the direct and brave speech of those days - days before Trapline "keep a daring spirit" skill - seeing trees after scholarship - making the show, having the parts. - Waking out of anxiety dream means a disproportion between the day experience and its emotional connection. Work on it goes in and repairs circuits in memory structure. Nodes of storage and interconnection. Basic unit of storage seems to be sensory image. Affective charge, also a pressure index (strong, weak). Question of why the sensory projection system. "A graded series of filters," "a fine mesh." Indexing by qualities A dream is a display of the sensory projection system. Dream as tracer into memory structure What is at issue is the quality of interaction with surroundings. The dream is not about the world so shouldn't be remembered. The newborn dreaming so much. The memory tree is entered at or near its origin.
- If we want to get to the very truth of things we must see them from the point of view where this world has not yet been created. Consciousness of this and that has not yet awakened. They call the stone the fetus. It is clear that wind is air and air is life and life is soul, that is, oil and water. - The exercise
A void
Being is the light in which they are seen.
The acceptance gesture A deep means to free the heart from hesitation Learning to fall, to stop walking cautiously. To take the failure with the whole person and then get up. Ki is the feeling of moving in relation to it. Heart is the intention - it plans and commits. When your heart is calm and clear your movement rights.
The back coming alive - eyes - feeling sound - full-body memory - being mobile and acting in conversation - being quick to speak the present - amazing looks - visions with closed eyes or open - love in color and any shape - not waiting on the other - hearing and seeing the other's state - Einstein's being able to imagine - closeness to presences in thought - lightness of walking (not limping) - touch very sentient and danced - writing light - a rush of force to be shaped. All beings as his other selves Yielding to an oncoming force in such a way that it can't harm you, and at the same time changing its direction by pushing it from behind. Wu-wei. Listening to a symphony was seen as nothing else but the outflow of my inmost nature which in itself remained bright, true and transparent It is a small of the large ko an. To keep life alive without letting it live. The vows are - saving all sentient beings, extinguishing all passions, studying all teaching, attaining the Buddha-truth. Highest degree of mobility with a center that's immoveable. The right amount of energy and none gone offside. I have no parents, I make heaven and earth my parents. I have no special power, I make exactness my power. I have no means, I make accepting my means. I have no magic knowledge, I make inward strength my magic. I have no life or death, what is my life and death. I have no body, I make fortitude my body. I have no eyes, I make the light my eyes. I have no ears, I make sensing my ears. I have no limbs, I make mobility my limbs. I have no design, I make occasion my design. I have no miracles, I make Being my miracle. I have no principles, I make presence, adapting, my principle. I have no companion, I make my mind my companion. I have no enemy, I make incautiousness my enemy. I have no style, I make right presence my style. I have no house, I make centeredness my house. I have no instrument, I make instantaneity my instrument. The truly inward sense of one's life was never born, but has always remained inside, somewhat as the life remains in the tree though the fruits come and go.
25 First the bus - turns onto Clearbrook Road, stops in a parking lot across the road from 3069, turns and goes past it - off the highway the strong DP in his fine Land Rover, without speaking, through Yarrow - marveling that the journey's touching through these centers - the Cultus Lake turn-off (Vedder Crossing), I was here with Frank and George - a woman and a daughter - the red old Jaguar with Dave - this face isn't quite right but I look openly into it - with pride, "I build steel-hulled yachts" - arriving at the door - the first person this grey-haired almoner at the kitchen door - "No one is expecting me." Looking at the mountains across the lake - this is the other side. Today in the store the old couple give me a quarter of mooncake.
A child felt myself under it. Young woman, child left sleeping in the house. From the pasture slope seeing a mountain like it, saying: that mountain, I never discovered what was behind it. Back of my grandfather's house. Looking onto the city river dreaming herself leapt through it onto a slope, a field. Someone was with me. My cells sparked. From another city traveling out I pass through my mother's parents and then my father's. I am at a lake touching my hand into the water crying with joy. The secret is simple: I wanted it to be that. The mountain beyond this lake is that same mountain I am on the other side of now. At the upstairs bedroom window with her son. She is naming for him the place where they are. She flies them from the sill through the yard over the slope across the mountain, then she brings them back. "The apple tree felled by lightning." "And then there was the grass, and then the stone window sill, and then there was a little boy sitting on the sill with a lady who is telling him a story about a mother and a little boy at a window." I could as much feel as hear the blood surging into the wings of my ears, and falling back. In such quiet I could hear it beating in the space of the whole of the room. Events connected not by cause and effect but by similar meaning If time is cohering again, why is it - not scared and marveling this time, just noticing - look carefully. a way of working to make a field of force in which - there's a different relation to universe Ion microscope - the imaging ion beams originate at the specimen surface. the little nerve that makes the eye a surface of the brain At one point in space there can only be one direction magnetic forces act, namely the resultant of the separate forces. Paths of magnetism appear to complete circuits. Field acts clockwise for current flowing away from the observer, counterclockwise for toward. If we dream of a house, the Self in as much as social. "Rooted in the past and in the group" as opposed to more nomadic self. That if she walked long enough, slept lightly enough to be conscious of her dreams, ate at random, was struck by new experience throughout the day, then her whole self cleared and lightened, she became alive and light and aware. Testing the walls for weaknesses, for a thin place, one day you will simply step outside, free. It will be as if the walls in that one place have crumpled and gone, and the room will seem like a horrible little cell that an animal has fouled. - The will that Indians did once, to get blood of imagery from a mother in the earth we might hear her as a scream. a language of visual imagery buried in race memory the ability to get from intuition to knowledge This is what a picture should give us, a warm harmony, an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a colored state of grace. All these tones circulated in the blood don't they? Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things and rise again from them, in colors. Two systems of lines interacting at an angle
meadow provides a symbol of the hypnotic level Field / unconscious Mor the song writer If they saw death and felt it as the stillness or ending of motion or breath, they would say "mor." Want to know - after one week there - no anguish, no stink, no grease, face sharpened, body lighter, pleasure, images, laughing, and what is the difference - one week here I'm heavier, in pain, sleeping a lot, skin swollen, stinking, greasy, without the images and relaxed eyes. City air boredom coffee idleness loneliness eating not more but in bigger batches of one thing, reading and writing, crossing limbs, being available to 'friends'. And the love dreaming, as if I must have it somewhere. Music music The flute flying alongside. ignore the old taxonomy, take our various senses as instruments of measurement and detection This novel conceptual economy could be run directly on the largely unappreciated resources of our own sensory system as constituted here and now It would bring us to be properly at home in our physical universe for the very first time. radically expanding the domain of human perceptual abilities of the rich fabric of entailment relations characteristic thermal, incandescent river of molecules forced upwards by the denser atmosphere surrounding permanent horizontal floor of visual space is the plane of the ecliptic. The position of his own planet will be translated to the right a visible amount. To see the situation tilt the head to fix one's bearings within the coordinate system whose plane is the ecliptic, whose center is the sun, and in which stars are motionless. It is plain that the axis of the earth's rotation [is to his right] is roughly parallel to the vertical axis of his tilted head. Then he sees the planet's movement. The position of his own planet will be translated [after 24 hours] to the right a visible amount, the position of the sun against the stars will be shifted about 1o or two solar diameters, to the left. The moon will be shifted 13o to his left, on successive nights the planets can be seen to inch along their expected paths, their reflected brilliance waxing and waning in testament to their changing distances from the earth. We can see at a glance that the sun is much further away than the moon, that Venus is about to pass us on the inside, that the month is April, that the north pole is up to the right. The need for an ephemeris is gone. A transformation of the processing of visual information perceived as manifestations of a new relational order, and the continuing details of that order become perceptually obvious. [Paul Churchland 1979 Scientific realism and the plasticity of mind Cambridge]
What is the curliness in the handwriting (who). Interview with Chantal [Akerman]. Going to leave envelope at Ellen Tallman's, UBC record library not paying fine. The slides. Beings that show up in them. The light of low-light, feeling that it's showing what was there. The sheet of paper. Using it to bring out - as it includes the black as something, a picture can be made out of the picture, magic. Imagining going to school to do music. Lying on T's couch watching TV. In the corridor this morning reading the Mitchell Report, she says "I
bumped into Jam downtown, I told you - did I tell you." In a bitterness
I wanted to say something mean about her, damage her, (I don't want her)
you can have her she's too fat for me. She's too fat for you too. Wanting
to betray her, spiteful about her donation card. "The things that woman
has to deal with in her life." And it's at the same time quailing as
if I never should. Listening to the Four last songs sending her love
because she's the only one who could be in music with me. The bitterness
that she didn't want, that she didn't have the coherence to trust and want
me, that she didn't have the sense to know we could confide and travel.
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