18 August 1983
Policing the relation to J, holding a stiff intent (noticing it's like
her), I must not weaken, I don't think of her qualities, it is like her,
not trusting myself. She'll get me again, I must hold stiff, at the same
time wondering what is the relation of this policing to Ellen's intervention
and possible design, and what is the relation in myself, of forbidding and
suppressed loving and sorrowing (I want her dead).
Protest letters, their tone, each one different, holding some and sending
some, unsure of all of them, what is the necessity of this, it articulates
the day's pressure, of complaint, the angry one seemed flirtatious, a destroyed
sober one seemed the explaining fair heaviness that she and I find woman-stupid,
anxious, but it is for balance in a way that tries to consider both.
Wondering at the way I return to lying and acting to defend myself, when
what is worst for me is just that misrepresenting self. Not indulging or
suppressing: acknowledging, informing.
The integrity I admire and lose in relation to where I admire it.
-
- She is faithful to her mother.
- She easily sees things when she closes her eyes.
- Her pottery is beautiful.
- She is unscrupulous about mind-bending. She is easily mind-bent.
- Her hair is thinning and greying.
- Ezra in a relation to her that's esoteric.
- Sandy is her serf.
- She has lost her zippy car.
- The flesh of her thighs is lumpy.
- Her back has always been beautiful, fine.
- She is sexually most sensitive on the back of her neck and ears.
- She used to breathe hard in a charming way, messy.
- She used to think she could be a business man or diplomat; I used to
believe it.
- Her beautiful sleep.
-
- - Has she released me, have I got free, have we come to it.
-
- The apartment she had before, Arabian Nights.
- We would be synchronous in work.
- I used to love her as soon as I saw her.
- Our red and white house. Our travels.
- Dear one thank you.
- She'd confuse me with romance.
- She was secretive in pain and fright.
- This old balancing voice is not with her.
- Her voice in me was for impressive cutting. Witty line.
- Beautiful unusual trust. Storms of unreason.
- Easily in love. Vicious in suspicion.
- The baby, the puffy child, the clear child.
- The puffed dad, the empress, the prince, the beautiful one, the steady
black and white, the fat belly drunk.
- Shamed sobbing.
- Social laugh on the phone. Compliant hahaha.
- Pity.
- An idea of honorable hardness.
- Delayed dissociated revenge.
- Small teeth.
- Moments of exquisite clinging.
- Crumbs in bed make her crazy.
- Feet like babies, hands like little children.
- Breasts like paralyzed limbs.
- The strange one. With unknown customs.
- "You're like someone from another planet."
- "She revised his geometry": she sang like a bird baby.
- She used to use an ugly voice for reading.
- Sudden gratitudes.
- Inexplainable ingratitudes.
- Hope for theory; she does it less, she doesn't write in her journal
now, she doesn't write her dreams, maybe she will now, yes, she will, she
was afraid to.
- It was worth telling her but she didn't like to know.
- I always forgot she wasn't one.
- I always forgot you were so many.
- I missed a lot. With everyone I miss a lot.
- I could think he of her.
- She could laze a clearing.
- She doesn't like baths.
- The visions we saw at first.
- Our likeness to the old Konrads.
- Her many clothes, knowing her clothes and dishes.
- The long dying of the thesis.
- The way she doesn't compact her story.
- Her leaps of calculation, their untestable bases.
- Mumbling.
- She wouldn't do this summary.
- I was willing to agree, to have a marvelous lover.
- I went on feeling a thrilling body with her.
- Difficult long tuning.
- Having beautiful hair in her mirror.
- Sudden catastrophes.
- Buying, crazy outfitting, course-taking.
- The man and woman story.
- So vulnerable to impression.
- Do I know her at all as young. Just a way of holding the head.
- I'm more curious of her than she of me.
- "You aren't going to be able to sustain it."
- Comprehension was why I said yes.
- Thrilling and holding each other by our ways.
- Apart from the glamour play, science effort, battle entertainment,
language exercise, challenge, what's there to do -
20
- "I didn't speak English when I went. I only spoke German when
I left and when I came home I was speaking English."
-
- Looking at her eyes, "You like that story! It's making you sad!"
-
- And the way she said "Do you mind that."
-
- "Not at all! It seems appropriate." That business word, why
did I say it like that, I meant that I loved it. Why wouldn't Jam ever
cry for me. Because she isn't a mother. Since then needing to come home
and write down that she cried.
21
- Undertow of pain at the solar -
- Teacup without handle I want to keep, it comes from then.
- The processing and what's it making of this time.
"The hardest part of being with family is the incest taboo."
"It's not the sexual taboo, it's the taboo against compassion."
[T]
A flash. "Is that why our mothers aren't curious?"
Saying to Ellen "I don't think those people know enough to ask a
child about its experience. I think people have to be quite developed and
educated and civilized before they know they should ask a child about its
experience."
- "But other people need to tell stories too!"
- "But other people don't have so much of a story. Such a difference."
I want to say to her: the reason I can't be with Jam (or Luke) is that
I don't keep my truth: I take it that means split.
27
Loneliness so intense.
Because what I need isn't there.
It will be rejected and I'll find out why.
But if someone will like it, will I like them - I think so.
Being unwilling to know that I go beyond, when I do.
- Who I want to be with doesn't any more exist.
- There will be no one else.
-
- Someone in the future maybe.
Keeping the sense that it's reenacting but with a witness.
- Am I in faith. I think so.
- Is it very dangerous. I think so.
And then it's all crippledness and disqualification around me. I take
the lot.
They don't allow me equal.
If they take Jam I'll destroy the garden, I'll make them move.
What it was with R, was, her not allowing.
-
January 1948, about the 10th of, midweek, flu, fever.
"We had gone along to Sexsmith a bit earlier. When we were coming
home the truck quit sort of at the bridge. 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."
"Will this go away or do we have to go to the doctor with it."
"You were sleeping but the legs weren't working. They wouldn't hold
you up." Monday or Tuesday.
"I had taken your pillow along in the truck. There hadn't been much
in the community. Joe Shannon and someone we didn't know. Joe Shannon was
totally crippled."
"You could talk anything in German. Your English was limited."
"Your neck was stiff - that was one of the signs of polio."
"We had to explain to you. I think they let you keep your pillow,
so you had something familiar." "An adult bed and isolation room."
"The awful feeling coming home without you. Everything was empty."
"We didn't have a phone, must have phoned from La Glace. 'Look,
I want you to come in.' He was trying to give me support. I asked him 'Is
it polio?' He said 'Yes I think it is. We don't know how bad it is.'"
"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."
"Ten days. I thought they were helping you."
"Mewburn Pavilion. When they had a bed for you they would let us
know."
"Until Eastertime, end of March or it seems to me it was April.
In that interval you did learn to walk. Your leg was stiff but you walked
along 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."
"From New Year until you left we didn't get visits from anyone or
we didn't take you anywhere so we were very isolated in that whole time.
I was only, what was I, twenty-three."
"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 when you told me this, that you
had been lying in your bed there and calling me and I ...."
"The nurses didn't have laps, only the doctor had a lap. Nur der
Doktor hat ein Schose."
"Basically there weren't so many tensions. Tensions built up later,
more. Then we still had quite high hopes, the war was over, it seemed there
was a future, one child and we didn't have another one immediately."
"This 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.
The sawmill, farming for Grandpa."
"Here I was back in what I came from."
"Instead of helping it 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 ...."
"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. 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. He ...."
"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 ...."
"What was there to stay for. All his children left the minute they
humanly could - such a state of torment."
"... 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."
"... 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 ... 'I'm a lonely little petunia in
an onion patch.'"
" ... your lively black eyes. Let's look this place over. I couldn't
really expect you to care that much about me or anything."
"... sitting there on the wood box day after day in deep despair
... a possible mobility to leave an intolerable situation. That was a large
part of his agreeing to it."
"His anger had a lot of clout before."
"The message I got verbally was to be submissive but the message
I got , how can I respect you if you don't know what I want."
28
Waking at night the whole solar plex raw as if it's the unhealed site
of the yanked attachment.
This day. The hard waking at night, again, charcoal hours, turning in
bed, waking from Luke lost again in agony. Read and eat. Lie on the bed.
Hot night. This day will be wasted, another.
What feels new is the doubt of her. It isn't different than what I knew
at first, she doesn't see me particularly, she doesn't have personal loyalty
or affection - I turn it immediately, and do I: and then it goes, no, for
the person, no, but what was it in all that time I adored. What does it
amount to. And felt irreplaceable to go on being with, that possibility
of speaking and hearing speech, looking closely at a body and face.
What have I got to, quite a lean woman with strong shoulders and arms,
hair tied back like Shevek. Some instancy in public. A floor of platform.
Rooms and windows. Blue shirts, a good winter coat.
I've achieved that I'm an inner and not an outer woman. Now I'd like
to travel with work, plain and light.
29th
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 autumn patch bergamot
mint bugle moss chives 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.
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 ...."
What's implied is that when she saw me crippled she saw herself unloved.
And break up with Jam and have a sore neck.
Remember I cried for my 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3
[Ellen Tallman] Tall and pink, the fine silver hair fall, anemone.
- "Does she ever say what she thinks of / your beauty?"
- "You look handsome and distinguished."
-
- 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.
-
- The Indian - the embryo - the paleolithic.
-
- The integrated sea
- The integrated universe body
-
- 5th
-
- Yesterday the wind blew dark weather away.
- The west wind blowing big-leaf trees, gold light on the green leaves,
light from the west, 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, the distance over unnoticed roofs to that
corner of the park, the grass all side-lit. Blows space into the centre
of the tree, blows space for light.
- The cedar this side of the big chestnuts, its different heavier movement
mesmerizing, underwater parting and closing like fur on a beast's belly
breathing.
7th
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
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, place found
to sit still by artemisia, sweet cicely, angelica, Japanese anemone, sweet
william, fern.
I don't remember very well what we said. "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.
-
- 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.
-
- The stress of self-feeling, vanity, uncertainty and mortification,
foreseen and shunned.
11th
- 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 - 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 put one into a lovely world
of finely resolved perception - the colors of it though are I think mine
- she created herself quite a warrior - and then equally the bewildered.
-
- 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. [gospel movie Say amen, somebody
]
-
- 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.
18
[Zen retreat]
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.
- Not being lazy.
- Not wasting time in that curiosity about people.
- I don't have to.
-
- The trees by the highway silver and gold glittering, bowed over.
- Waiting in the car the stand of beings bowing and stirring.
-
- "Buddha is yo hus ban."
20
- The body suddenly changed, lighter, can get knees to floor, headstand
falls lightly to balance.
-
- Stroking the arms, sexual, gentle, warming.
- "Your velvety hands, you have very light hands." [T]
-
- 1st October
-
- How sparkling it was when I said up straight "This is my last
session."
4th
- The way in reading Koestler I'm feeling the theories made as if by
people still in the womb, "like waves along the time-axis of the space-time
continuum."
5th
- "She would never be able to trust me." "It was partly
racial and partly gender."
-
- "After we'd been in some amazing time together, sexual or talking,
the next time I saw her she'd have changed again."
-
- "She was too sadistic." It's Sandy I explain to - Akbar -
someone from her group - "Jam and I have separated. You could try
again if you're still interested."
I'm in these fantasies oblivious.
8th
1. Astounded to see the patriarchal design of ideas we work within, metaphysical,
scientific, religious, and the deformation undertow in them, by what it
leaves out, not so much the matriarchal as the prenatal. The actual original
dichotomy which when it's seen does away with the difference between.
The direction it comes from
Phallic enthrallment
My parents in it are - on the one side- Hegel - and on the other - Dorothy
Richardson, who do the same thing in different ways.
- Lateralization: from two sides: place: from the two sides.
- On the one side a man energetically teaching math.
- On the other a young girl saying the sewing has to be started again,
whose music is too far away to play along with.
-
- 2. Going to home landscape with an artificial project, to make a landscape
film which became, in a still artificial way, to find out what place is.
-
- What happened actually was the place seen again with possibilities
of seeing brought back into it from friends and opponents, books, Riddington,
an actual person.
-
- Financed through: Mary Epp, Brinkman Reforestation, the Department
of Human Resources, Canada Manpower, the Canada Council, Bull Oilfield
Catering, Hastings Steam Bath.
-
- Lightshow: back-project, sound.
-
- What is moving really: her breath is. It lights the inside of her chest.
-
- The baby's first encounter is with daylight - its first other, m'other
sun.
-
- I am the little dark one
- M'other sun
-
- Such simple showing. Like a strong star.
13
- It was a partial shift in the sense of the relation of inside and outside.
I am not sure even now how far this shift can be taken.
-
- I imagined bringing inner and outer as if both outside, thoughts and
images seen with an equivalent seenness.
-
- That was one sense of it. The other was a reading of the meaning of
outside things and happenings in the same way as dreams or fantasies.
-
- "Everything I do these days is making support for this effort
to make myself someone who is not left behind."
-
- The other way is the clean wanting to see.
14
Suddenly rushing to tell Joyce I'd found out that when I was working
on going home it was really about going home. She in her bright voice quickly
says "I knew it was that." "Did you really?" Her gold
dress and belt and old thin neck and pretty face. "You were saying
it but you didn't know you were saying it." "I didn't know how
far there was to go home." Now writing it I can see she may not have
meant what I did: she saying "Everything is said on so many levels,
one has to be careful. 'It is written.'"
- Sitting with Josie among the old paintings. I did catch myself and
say "I don't know why I'm spiteful. I find myself wanting to say bad
things about her to people. I don't like that, I don't know why it's like
that, maybe the spite is just because it couldn't go on, it came to its
limit and couldn't go past it."
-
- 24
-
- Dark morning - the dead heat pouring into my rooms - mourning that
doubts - have we really left each other, is it really you I miss, when
what would cure me is anyone wanting to hear me talk - anyone seeming to
- any real fucking.
25
- What could I do - am I free now to talk to myself - how it seems is
pressed to jump into another life - I have to go somewhere else - have
another life this one is over - I don't have anything to do with Rhoda
- I've cut myself off from Cheryl and Jam, Daphne won't have anything to
do with me, with Trudy I have to watch myself. Other people I could like
- seem to beware of me. On the street I look ugly. The new clothes are
old. The money's gone and it's borrowing. Dark and wet - in the last bad
winters I've had writing and someone to address - the writing is there
from then but none of this can feel itself anything but maintenance.
-
- I'm not what I was. That haunting again.
31
Seeing I could back-project and front project.
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.
6th
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.
18
Making the date for Women in Focus, two days being strong abundant mental
generous.
19
NW2-74-8-W of the 6th meridian
The grass comes toward me in waves.
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