| edged out 7 part 6 - 1983 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28 October 1983 If "women are oppressed" means - I oppress myself as a woman and that's specific not general - and by whom. The lover-other can be equal but I won't stay if s/he takes the dominated. Who's the oppressor - half the time - its mother stopping sex or pressuring or usurping.
Being a lesbian to be more interesting to men. Values: Sister and sex, hot younger self Dog, baby = penis, Luke Mother = repression, rival, and also - Grandparents = (happy) marriage, order, house The older man, Greek neighbour Carmichael = married desired one / and Holley, Pete, Maryanne Robert = marriable desired one / 'poet' but unable Paul's place = desiring men Bears = beaver The fat man = pregnancy High school girls, nurses = breasts Derelicts = Rhoda = The grandmother and her pictures - ? (womb) Social life is family rivalry dreaming. Art, metaphysics is prenatal/natal dreaming. The relation of dreaming and waking.
What do I think it will get me - they're suspicious of it because really I hate them - under one sign - and am fascinated by their beauty, unconfessed - (only he is allowed to be) - but don't really want to take on the responsibility of satisfying them - I want him to do that - what do I want to do with their beauty - mess around - what is it about satisfying them, it's work, I'd have to master them - I can do it but don't like to - is that the hate - what coming would do for them - (!?) - it makes me a man. It seems I was feeling the meanings of birth, that there was someone prior. How much of the story to tell. How to tell it without perpetuating metaphors. Not about but from.
The you - The time surrounded by - a submission piece
Before during and after Raiding the family 'Crazy': The Courage of Lassie - people whose look - young - synthesizer - not wanting to look at them. The slides of fire. Wandering looking for sisters, dim, on the trail, go downstairs and am early. Hair down Mei-Lin. I want some / red / roses / for a / blue / la / dy - and if they do the trick / I'll hurry back and pick / your best white orchids - The steam bath - pressing a shirt - I'm ugly but I'll have to shine my spirit - dejected - and come upstairs and just then the door opening - to Lee, the black woman, Mei-Lin, and yes she - top of her head - one in each room - what she's wearing - all the new clothes - I've smiled and shrugged - she's frowning, stands and I stand, goes downstairs, I leave. That group of girls is it really what she wants? Is she really one who wants that. 29 Being in the wrong street and then coming to the door and seeing the German girl on the window curb and then she at the car door, and in daylight knows me. Looking at the one I was with dreaming, feeling what's it like to pass near, look at, say hello - hers and mine - what quality - listening, as I go in through the door again to hers, again to mine, "Hello". Doubt. In both the sound of doubt? I'm not sure. Because I thought she was myself and J. Looking at her during the show, loose white-sleeved shirt, she's thinner and carries herself hunched. The voice in Africa so rapid and foreign, hunched as if around her breasts and stomach, rapidity and foreignness of a beautiful difference. The big space and each person in their place. Finding Josie's and Cheryl's on a floor where it was two others whose work I would want to know. Josie's chicken's colors. Wanting to love Cheryl and having nothing in her work. But Kathy Beer's windows, glass, copper and glass blue lines. Marianna Schmidt size color lines, demons in clean spaces. I want to say "It would help me to know what it is you want instead, what it was you didn't want." Doubt. Should I be saying instead - the way Josie and Cheryl's work is by some other than I knew - I can think instead, (my lover) doesn't any more exist - was made by me. Adam - the Zen men and this morning Toby. Let me enrich this person as I know them because they will not go on - Jean saying "We'd have disagreements and quarrels but I was often thinking 'Isn't this just great!'" Then wanting to recreate for myself the person who was. In sitting - if the relation to the body is the relation to the attracting sex - is it also that they humiliate me means my body does - what relation - apprehension and shame - was that his - and someone loving my body can restore me - and then at times the loving it - in as much as it's a relation to an external body - says don't objectify your body - I hate my body not yours - is that it - I love your body is - I want to take it - whether Josie's painting is self-hate. Thinking of oneself by means of an image formed by looking at others - making one's thought of oneself inaccurate. I am nothing of what happens to me, you are nothing of value - when inferiority comes, dissociating from it - denying oneself and charging the other - become confused. By what structural means the re-evocation of certain imaginary personae, the reproduction of certain situational inferiorities, may disconcert. fragmenting effect on the imago of the original identification Identifying with the rival - secondary. a primary identification that structures the subject as a rival with himself fixation of an imaginary ideal which decides the conformity of the instinct to the physiological sex of the individual genital libido a blind supersession of the individual in favor of the species Irreducible narcissistic structure - the constancy of aggressive tension. the space in which the imagery of the ego develops a psychological analysis of space the individual's relation to a particular spatial field is mapped socially The way the fear of death is psychologically subordinate to the fear of damage to one's own body. the original splitting right down to the depths, a neurosis of self punishment Symptoms of functional inhibitions, derealizations of others and the world.
She with her young sister hearing that it's structural a pattern of tendency in relations.
Instead of being that patterning you must observe it. Illumined: "the body effectively the same as energy or consciousness" when the total surface of the body is enlightened. The ultimate mode of the nervous system is "cognized at the level of" touch. You principally violate the organization of the being relative to the sense of touch. At the level of touch we read the very condition of the nervous system in space. As touch, that condition is blind. The inferiority - coming to know its point of view. Confusions substitutions summations 'fields'
'The ideal complex' - the values of painstaking integrity by exclusion 'The young self' - the values of immediate life, myself allowed I don't know which one I identify with. Enjoying myself:
Disliking myself, anti-identification:
- represent the competence and power of all take our various senses as instruments of detection and measurement That it's about attention, someway straightforward I can tell the efforts.
a discourse marked as imitative or subservient
Everything I do these days is making support for this effort to make myself someone who is not left behind. Stand in the Free Position. The going under and uncanny light learning to see in the dark At the threshold it falls apart into two.
"radiation pressure on surface" (heat) Overlap - the spaces between sounds - holes in a structure - crystallized in my mind - solid - I was feeling it with an unknown part of myself - patterns superimposed on environment - the lure of the hole in the hills - hinged Every single sound pattern which coincided with a feature of the environment was hinged on that hole.
No necessary connection between other speeds and alpha. - Lateralization: small writing - J - Carmichael - 'objective' - reflective - mastery
big writing
31 Seeing I could back-project and front project - then - the way that gathers up - she could project - lateralization - the screen - the audience gathering in the space - this space prepared yesterday, already saying so. Then when she phones and what she imagines is - (find out exactly what it wants). Worried - I'm going to have to refuse again, my fantasy had us being friends, she was helping with my show - why was I giving her the impression on the phone, that we'd be together again - and that she didn't hear when I said nothing had changed - in fact, is it for money - the last fifty of my own - and then the worst predictions of her family are true - and then: 1 November Dreams - bank - breakfast - laundry - Omni - melatonin and winter anguish - library - rain - the brain books - serotonin - hemispheres - eating and reading - art gallery - catalogue - back to the library for Pribram and Brossard - Leonardo's subimages excitement - bus - darkness - reading the brain books - noodles - meditative state. UV and infrared, cosmic x-rays to electromagnetic At low temperatures only the infrared, as temperature increases also the shorter wavelengths. UV is most variable with atmospheric. Certain dyes make the skin sensitive. Red light has greatest power of penetration, stimulating growth and lactation - activates sex hormones - healing is faster - increases blood pressure, temperature, pulse - but overstimulates animals whose nutrition doesn't keep up. Blue light pulse relaxes - blue penetrates though less - violet "to soothe the nerves." To Bagnall auric light is ultraviolet. Dycyanin filter - gaze at the sky through - then with back to dim light look at naked person standing in front of a screen. Even blind people, arms will go toward red and infrared and away from blue and UV. Light in one eye, tonus of that side. "Subcortical visual areas," blindsight, they don't see but they know, "guess." Galileo "This heaven, this earth, this universe, which I have enlarged a hundred, nay a thousand fold." Descartes. He took the eye of an ox, cut a window in the back of it and replaced it with paper, holding the eye up to the light he saw on the paper a tiny inverted image of his room. Inner surface of the back of the occipital lobe. [sketch of left cortex] L writes, speaks. R reads. R "not good with verbs" but does have vocabulary and syntax of young child. Read Chinese not phonetic. Each hemisphere a whole in itself with only half a body to serve it. discussing with their left hemisphere the thought of their right Reversed in uninverted left-handers (40%) and others? "A few in both." In young children both have speech potential. Lateralized "in their second year," potent before birth. deeply different grammars predilection for binary system and tendency to praise the more abstract Verbal question eyes right. Emotionally charged eyes left. [three pages of tables comparing L and R hemisphere capabilities, female/male capabilities, my own right and left sides found in the 2-sides exercise, and binary contrasts as assigned to the two sides] Right body feels open, light - the yard, spring, light, fresh - "float" - up vertical, air distance - color, freshness - spring, early summer, open, white - pleasure, air movement, weightless - joyful. Left body - feels massive, masculine - dark night in a room 'working' - "I'm sad" - enclosed, winter night work - "myself as a lifetime working" - black and white, anxious, more independent of the question, less rapid - mature. 4th Black paper and white paper, projecting over. 5th Black on the other side backs the image, dark slides show through little, light slides cancel the front, and the image seen through is yellowish. Little baby through in its box. The galactic horizon Pain, moon in opposition Harriet Martineau - her deafness, resolves, easy fame. I want to be famous so people will come toward me in an interested way. For the black and white if I could only make it step-printed. The smoke scraps Analysis of rain into water release grasp release grasp ping - ping - ping - ping toward shorter intervals. Dissolve. Rain from one shingle to the next Relativity and physics notes The prince and princess, 9 children, a daughter then two sons when the two shall be one, the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female 6th The hemispheric differences The pre and post (oedipal/natal) The male and female assignment Physical difference The common good / the soul's delight Knowing and not-knowing Sadism and masochism Eros is an interweaving delight in experiencing, logos is discriminating, distancing.
Light and fear We have scores of allies among us but since our eyes can only look at things we don't notice them.
That which is light looks at me. If I am anything in the picture it is always in the form of the screen. - Going through my papers puzzled at the inferiority of the writing. I seem stupid in conversation, I forget names, stammer about technical things, scramble information. It might be from speaking too little. There are things I write to record a colored image.
That visual writing is a knowledge medium but I am in the difficulty with it, of not feeling it as a knowledge, and then having to refind that knowledge in another way, as part of a system of explanation, and often by way of amassing quotations. I don't understand why my thinking is often poor - I mean, not as good as the best, who when I read them seem normal. Most thinking is poor. I seem to think badly when I'm trying to think as myself. I want thinking to be immediate and easy. Is there a way I can position myself, maybe by impersonating someone else. It seems an unstable way, I think it's what I do already. Dorothy Lee [don't know what work, maybe 1950] on the other hand, names a behavior of great strain and propriety no arrangement of activities into means and ends The line "It is basic to the emotional climax that has so much value for us." In our thinking about personality and character we have taken for granted the presence of the line. We are constantly acting in terms of an implied line. To be accorded status, he must use the guiding line as basic. I am not convinced that we have not created our recording instruments in such a way that they have to picture time and motion, light and sound, heartbeats and nerve impulses, lineally, on the unquestioned assumption of the line as axiomatic. The Trobrianders at no time mention circles or rings or even rows when they refer to their villages kiway which means bump or aggregate of bumps. and all Trobriand speech, according to Malinowski, is 'jerky,' given in points, not in connecting lines. their gardening with all its specialized activities, both technical and magical They assumed the validity of a magic spell lay, not in its results, not in proof, but in its (very) being; in the appropriateness of its inheritance, in its place within the patterned activity, in its being performed by the appropriate person, in its realization of its mythical basis. Their names for constellations imply that they do see lineal figures. coherence in their acts because Trobriand activity is patterned activity. One act within this pattern brings into existence a preordained cluster of acts. the making of a sweater the acts are embedded in the pattern which I have chosen. Though intercourse is a necessary preliminary to conception, it is not the cause of conception. The pattern of sexual intercourse includes the giving of a gift from the boy to the girl; but if a boy gives a gift so as to win the girl's favor, he is despised. labeled with a vile phrase: he barters Paths are not named by the points at either end. "They are not to and from, they are at." When we in our culture deal with events or experiences of the self, we use the line first, we feel we must arrange events chronologically in a linear order secondly, we arrange events and objects in a sequence which is climactic, in size and intensity, in emotional meaning, or according to some other principle. His garden spell:
To him value lines in sameness, in repeated pattern, in the incorporation of all time within the same point. He can indicate that an action is completed but this does not mean that the action is past; it may be completed and present where we would say "many years ago" and use the past tense, the Trobriander will say "in my father's childhood ". Past, present and future are presented linguistically as the same. Where we see a developmental line, the Trobriander sees a point, at most swelling in value. For example, every occasion in which a kula object participates becomes an ingredient in its being and swells its value. We see our history climactically, plan our experiences climactically. has not meaning, because the series leads to nothing Failure is devastating in our culture because it is not failure of the undertaking alone; it is the <line which has failed>. I'm in a café reading a newspaper review of the film I saw the night before. I hear the film mentioned at the next table: a man is complaining, really almost whining, that the film had no story. "There was a lot of good scenery innit but you couldn't say it had a story at all." 7th [meeting with Cheryl] Cheongsam top synthetic print and racecourse tweed cap. "They make a good breakfast here." Gnats. Feeling pain. She said, my loneliness. Are you certain of that? No, just pain. Between midriff and knee. The layers of image in the slide. "It's a box." "The black and white of this work. What's next to it constantly is wondering what it is that makes me unacceptable to people." Looking at her thinking maybe I can just see her now. The talk garbling by. I don't stop to make sure it's something because I have another association to tumble out. We exchange bits without going into them as they are in each other. She's offering reparation. I'm showing lorn and inspired, sickly. "Shallowing." So moved by everything in this shallow ---, noticing how in a meeting she changes with the speakers, not being anchored. I understood it in sensation though not exactly, whether one has a cord down into the center of the body, that informs one of one's position, or whether it's flurries through the face between throat and eyebrow. "Sometimes one doesn't know how close one has been to someone." 8 Then, in the evening, Rudy's voice - the night I didn't sleep much - "RUDY! WHAT IS IT?" - "It's a boy" - my heart fell - who's born is not one of us - and everything said after that pushed through concealment - ashamed operating on the conversation, and being the one to end it though the story's good, she got out of the bath and knew it was time to go into town. There were few nurses on shift, it was black early morning. The doctor wasn't available (his voice). He was away for the weekend. They had to phone the doctor in Beaverlodge to come, but he was too late - he liked that, knew I'd like it - the nurses were in a panic, but "everything was done that should be" - his account of it and my hearing it were clashing, the nurses were running into each other on the shining linoleum - "Mom said she never saw nurses like that." The two old people are asleep in their city-design ranchhouse in the country, the furnace is humming warm air over the carpet, the phone rings, it's he in his nightshirt who answers it, they warm the truck, the exhaust is a strong white billow that throws a rolling shadow on the snow, in the yardlight. It's the year's first snow. They drive in the darkness, west on the familiar road. They're more excited than either one knows. They're going to be given the little prince to take home, there's going to be another one of them. They meet Rudy in the corridor. The older little boy is asleep in his own quilt on a plastic leather banc in the foyer by the nursing station. Rudy and Elizabeth have caused a story in the place. This is the baby who came without the doctor. He's black-haired, he has such long black hair. "Did he look like anyone?" "Well it changes so fast. He had black hair and his eyes I thought of Paul." "It's quite something to see." "And you don't know who it's going to be, and then it's so suddenly there - now it's going to be very interesting for you." The way his voice breaks into planes facing different directions - chaotic Rudy who stayed in the place, who traveled and came back in strange uniforms that attracted a girl who would be a good woman, who also had traveled, in drugs, who partied for a year, who got away with a fine child she named (the same as mine) - who allied herself with me and who I gave my invitation, who I advocate in the family, with the language that makes a bridge inside those who can't make that bridge themselves - intervention - but who's double-crossed me with this boy, who was meant to be me again - I perked up here, black hair, long black hair - do all give birth through each other. [Kane Epp] Her quality [Hong Kingston] - the female avenger - how did she do it - she made herself big enough to contain two systems, she let them marry, they produced vividly - what did her actual husband do, he thought her beautiful, it was his love of her strangeness that made it possible for her - Jam hardly lets herself love my westerness - he loved every scrap of her past, he joined his love to her life - her life came back to her to be with him. Trudy didn't remember the time around the worst thing she ever did to me, she couldn't recognize my description of the issues - I saw myself having been scenes of marvels they never saw, I was with gods, I was hearing dimensions, it was the farthest I traveled, she thinks of it as a time she was grotesque. Sitting across from her at her table under my house, I watch myself easily keep my strength. I don't take her in. I watch what she won't admit, I know where I am. I'm saying my life here is over, she says: "You don't have to go away, you only have to open yourself." ("If she lived even three blocks away it would be different.") I see, yes, I could. Imagining myself taken into that life, I feel sick. Her sources are dream, memory, myth, and desire. Her mother who told her stories. The 7th of November is a good date. What does the new life need to have. Seeing in the new Annie Dillard that her books have brought her a husband (and feeling: now her writing's over). "You aren't willing to go through what it takes." No.
layers of transparency contain dots of sparkling color which form images that float at one depth or stretch through several layers As we penetrate deeper, smaller and smaller creatures become visible. retinal absorption and release We can also focus each eye separately, one eye on her chest and one eye over the landscape. Then we transpose landscape onto chest, which becomes screen for moving pictures. the many images that compose the head of this phallus sfumato technique in which images appear, merge, vanish and change position with the slightest shifting of our eyes as if they were made of dust or mist Background, foreground, humans, animals and landscape "virtually inseparable." did not execute a stroke or line without considering that it had to serve several images at one time or the same image in changing motion Phos phoros light-bearing When the eye dilates in the dark, surprise - Psychic perspective Speaking through
A freer soul I was trying to be as if I could know. Only the one who is devoted to utmost sincerity can unfold her own nature completely, and through that she can also unfold the nature of her surroundings completely, and thus can support the transforming and nourishing powers of heaven and earth. Only one devoted to complete inner sincerity can know the future; this virtue is really a quality of nature and thus a union of the outer and inner can take place and the ways of heaven and earth can be explained in one sentence, they are without any doubleness. "The threshold of consciousness" - a doubling phenomenon, so to speak. - That what we call time is an archetypal idea, we do not yet know what time really is. - Metaphor - was seeing it as something like a screen, something set up where the real thing is missing, which then takes a meaning from (somewhere else) - it was two words. During the night, before the big mouse jumped on my neck, thinking maybe - by seeing - grain, a mist - something like: the grain is necessary - projection - etc. Wondering if it put the mouse on my neck to wake me. Analogy a sliding scale, in parallel. A span of scales.
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