| edged out volume 8 part 4 - 1984 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6th March 1984 The acres of the memorial, the Japanese contributed - we're rising to view it, the plane is the whole plane of us - the Japanese ambassador's stiff smile suggests we'll be nuked a bit further up. Comfortable with Don, kissing, but his mouth so cold. I say looking through the ladder at him with white hair fringe and a black fuzz, I'm seeing how you were as a school boy. (- Feeling Oxford.) The pile of writing a finished account of my high school years, I was happy. Out with the wood remembering the light of the early time with J, in my house and hers. War fire and decision seems to be here again. The mystery of not-seeing, can I do for myself what I've been doing for him. The beautiful bad story of the harama. An Bonefoot sez: everything I write is written by a crippled woman. That one was written by my womb. It's hope that's my enemy. But I'm ugly thinking so. 8th
"There is a lot of aspiration in it. There is a lot of aspiration in you." The Indians knowing they're going to get money selling everything in their houses. The piles of clothes' colors. They're selling them in dale [?]. Edit Sonderh. We should love life's long hours of sickness / and narrow years of longing / like the brief --- of the desert's flowers. Molecular electronics - a 3d protein lattice small enough to fit in a cell 'critical period' many connections made and then dissolved - "may store memories in their microtubule matrix" - "how a nerve impulse could cause clusters of microtubules inside the cell to oscillate in unison, like reeds swaying in the wind" - traveling wave fronts - interference. - Walking through looking how the houses are made - dug down, in the excavation are small trees growing, and then the foundation, piled rock, drywall, about the height of a person, timber frame and poles from outside the hole, for the roof.
10th A sojourner - 11 Waking into the feeling of - it's a blank now - dreamed something like an argument about whether consciousness is in the pink bumps [sketch] or should come into statement.
In order not to be pulled away into the visionary or all those other modes. - [address of tessera in Toronto]
what seems mine - London - La Glace - Luke - slides - a certain one of the writing voices, that clear light. when - False visual covering true audible, speaking the truth writing lies - homophone code.
Soit à la fois inférentiel technicien et révélateur. DR battling in the politics of perception, for what's to be noticed, and how, whose nervous system, whose endocrine balance, whose senses, whose upbringing will feel at home in I ask What Is to teach me. Of any work, what's its speed. "Drawing from the same system of structural opposition." 14 In this dead time in Vancouver the odd new experience of watching her theorize and refusing to go along - seeing I understand nothing - her flurry of thinking about - I was like that - she saying she understood what Blake was doing - the way I'm neutral with her body - the heat in the diaphragm when she said she'd tell me what Laiwan's doing with writing - "Going around with your wooden face" - on the bus thinking I could know it's dying and be with its dying - realizing with love that's what she's doing - when she said what would bring my work would be being married, "I think you could get quite a good man," now - am I in this blank because I've been so long with a system that doesn't know anything about me - waking in solar plex anxiety - notes about the enclosure, the basket materials and the scythe, gender would be assigned according - I flash out. The journal - I was a woman, trying to be a woman, trying not to be a woman - helpless with my material, I can't graduate, I can't write my ain folk, I don't know them - really to write as the crippled woman, is it to go back to beauty - I wonder if there's something you're not telling me, because you aren't noticing there's something I'm not telling you - she depends on her strictness, she depends on her seeing - should I write Tony. I was no longer this unintelligible woman whose thoughts and actions deviate from their own secret logic. I was unavoidably confronted with this unknown couple, about whom I could make up stories as long as the mysteries lasted. the domain of authority She has become a writer because of him and in spite of him. From that point forward I knew why I existed and because of this I knew a peace of soul that allowed me to get back on my feet again. [Is this Duras in The ravishing of Lol Stein?] The woman who killed an ugly man: she's a head shot without paint speaking slow, only sometimes rolling the whites of her eyes as she says they had a German shepherd, "It was a big dog," the huge husband feeding Daryn his vomit mixed up with baby food. "Things no human being should have to tell another" said the jury man. "I knew one of us would die." [Doc on TV about a woman on trial for killing her husband.] In these days watching thought not work - phrase says - I consider it and refuse it - am left with nothing but absorbing into TV - a relation in self - does it mean something that it's the same with her - about the kitchen she saying I use it so she doesn't recognize it - disregard different uses of knives - sticky drips - that I don't like how she's wanting to write - I say if I were really to be there I'd be so offended I couldn't be there - she arguing that little nice men are best - she fought to get me to see her the way she thinks her mother saw her father - and on my side, if she wants that she has to look like my father - otherwise thought is divided / from touch and sight - dear one it isn't political. The dream thesis Dream reading teacher, meditation teacher of Queen Titania who has turned her King into an ass "Listening, that debauchery that ages the face," says Colette. Often having to read backward, can't stand the ordering meant to make it easy. [ie reading from the back of the book forward] "Surfacing" "Surely the surfacing subconscious stream" "criticism which adopts the terms of an existing critical theory," terminology and theory The ghetto of woman's body - "while we have been doing literary housekeeping, they have been gazing at the stars." must break the connections with the symbolism that immobilizes feminine thought to the neurological system (ecstasy, white, consciousness, condition - leave behind the symbolic of fertility - for "real presence in language") Will find its sources of energy in
If we live in a space which is radically in question for us, that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself. For voice does issue in part from civil space. [Sounds like Kristeva] Dennis Lee "Country, cadence, silence" Open letter Fall 1973
Blue lines - Barry
Kristeva polylogue 'recent' 'theory' 'text' 'discourse ' 'feminist' 'formal' 'Quebec writers' 'English Canada' 'tradition of realism' 'subversive' 'content' 'strong empirical bias' 'the production of meaning through language' 'arguing very strongly' 'that's of course ...' 'the whole notion of ...' 'in the use of language that the text embraces' 'intertextuality' 'praxis'
What's the relation of beauty and dividing. "Words I am not going to use because I experience them as membership words." In the Anglophone tradition one is transcribing reality, translating a reality which is total and exists out there and one can mirror it in language. Fitting language. These people are doing something quite different. The critic's measure being that s/he recognizes her own world. "unspoken but always present subtext"
Her sophistication seeing the thing shown hiding as visible. I'm outclassed, not seeing anything that isn't given as visible. Illusions of closure - perfection - simplicity. If the writing isn't meant to sell its author but to - Being forced by contradiction, to - chora
1. substitute by opposite 2. inverse order 3. nonsense connectives
In myself, before writing, the space of charges, uncommitted and then committed. Combat of impulse making me work. - The image of the underside of reflection Writing that's useable, I like to be .... The prestige of incomprehension What is the author wearing, the game of being a person in language Then phallos = 1. what stands = attention, 2. what comes in = food, and goes out. Phallas Athena - god's finger is the nipple and omphallos. Origin is on our side - every androcentric value goes back to what's common. We end patriarchy by stopping fidelity. Mnemonics and power Kristeva's confusors - 1. un receptacle - it's an enclosure, bag, pot, there's a location marked off by some dividing material - ie it's the own body - is own body from the beginning? Yes, inside and outside is given. Therefore un receptacle = the notion of inside/outside - the mother, the own body, region topos, stomach and gut, bed, le corps la mere la femme. 2. l'intervention - it's something that comes in and divides - ventris the belly fent findere to split - a small opening, a finger-hole - wind - venter - law the womb of a wife or mother - a hollowed part, as of a bone - the surface of a petal that faces the interior - any of the various cavities of the body, ventricle of heart, brain, spinal cord - ventiloquism belly speech - venture - vena - Venus - vena cava - venal, selling - venery venari of hunting - venerari revere - venial venia forgiveness - venin poison. The image of a hand in the gut, the idea of entering/leaving. Intervention = finger in ass, finger in mouth, fantasy of getting in umbilicus, penis in vagina, person in house, invading army, colonizing, immigration, food down the hatch, turd, baby out. Breast/food, penis/turd, god's finger, cord. Phalanges of fingers and toes - phalangos line of a battle - phalaris coot - phallos - a piece of tail - fa la - falx falcis sickle - "broad and slightly curved blade" - falcon - because of curved beak or wings - breeds trains or hunts with falcons - falconet a small canon - a falcon-gentle is a female falcon, faucon gentil - faldan to fold - feallan - the phall of man - fallacious fallere deceptive - the phallen angel - the red fall fish - fall guy - Phallopian - phall-out - summer phallow - fealging fallow land - deer - phalls - false flax gold-of-pleasure - phallshood - Phallstaff - phallter - falsa imaginae - fealty participation and tribute (tribus descendence through mom). intérvention téléologique - there's the first sense of piece of tele - log, stick - something into the belly - but something into or out of the (mouth). The womb and stomach confused The idea of intervention in the cord Then it's après l' intérvention. 3. La disposition - a setting out - setting away from centre - something done by hand - d'un procès - of a process, of a trial - procedure, processing food - in a certain order - sorting Then disposition, disposal and process are inverted. 4. Qui pour etre celui du - something done for ownership - to own / to be owned - a firm tie - something done to be attached - to often be, often be with - to be sorted with. Sujet - does she mean self as she feels herself - my experience of myself - my experience sorted into self and nonself - "what it's about" - who it's for - the thing that's moved by the speaker and thinks itself moving - the subject is the object of the speaker.
A - because a man is showing himself contemporary - ie the baby feels the breast as another baby - ie we're back at placenta - god's cloud. - The subject is what thinks itself being The subject is higher than the object - it is seen doing But subject is equally the speaker's object, "take as my subject" In subjection - thrown under my - "a body for dissection or a person used" - "serving as the basic idea of" - "a branch of learning" - "about which something is affirmed or denied" - ego or self, substance, essential being. Then subject = control/controlled, getting / not getting, thriving/loving, ordering/decomposing.
5. Traverse la coupure - 'couple' - 'blessure' - cupness - cutness - cord - skin - pours through - pours across - cooper - another contradiction - crossing what's cut and can't be crossed - stroke, blow - couple, two of a kind - the join, coupler - so coupure is join/sunder, twoness. Transverse - lying across, athwart - the long axis - colon - trav over across or through - 'go over' - to oppose, thwart. Unaire - urinaire - secreted stored and passed - trait unaire - akin to ouron oura tail - unbroken line - coupure unaire is bladder - v is displaced Qui l'installe - ceasarian, belly birth 6. Et fait intervenir dans son topos - puts into its mouth - top, surface, spin - head Qui l'installe - places - stallions - confines - 'confinement' - confined because confining - confined and fed - a domestic animal, large - ie organs - sheath or covering - steall - stal stable - stael place - stalassein trickle - stale stool urine of cattle or horses - estale fixed position - to diaper - then is bull the male pisser and shitter - stale the smell of myself - stool sprouting - the sleep of the animals in the barn. La lutte des - loot Pulsions - drives, instincts - pulsations, pulses Coupure - cut - stoma - rim structures - Once the structure of language has been recognized in the unconscious, metaphor and metonymy, substitution.
Bring their false brilliance back to the gap that they designate, which I always find instructive, and above all to try to work out the method of a sort of calculation.
It is castration that sustains this strong ego, so strong, one might say, that its proper name is an inconvenience to it, since the neurotic is really Nameless What he does not want is to sacrifice his castration (his difference) to the pleasure of an Other he imagines the other demands. Castration means pleasuring refused. Castus pure. Kasta to throw.
- The pleasure of writing a suite of dreams for someone to read To like myself I have to be skilled framey body willed quick laughing alone focused proud sexual impious hungry unusual soft light-hearted. To manifest true self as absolute centre of gravity
16 The firstborn in times of calamity Tears coming when I think yes I'm in mourning of my love of her.
"Sitting there on the wood box day after day in deep despair. For many years we didn't go anywhere or see anyone." "That you're a nothing, that you're not a worthwhile person."
17 It isn't aspiring.
In a light boat floating over, in green water, a Japanese warrior's head, long hair and beard, calmly gazing - the weeds Anne brought in from deeper water, but when I see them, they're anchored here in the bay - we row over another head, maybe younger - I tell her about the first one, we pass over it again. Having noticed the undertow of the presence of the inside of the body, not just as sexual feeling, the sensation of throwing-off, contraction behind eyes - a hardening - change of angle - mouth focused forward, enough holding down - I want to move - refuse - insist - force - know what's against me and pass it. It means I have to be willing to be with people I've passed.
18 And now it's sadness anxious forehead, Little men, crying for kind parents - subliminal isn't - what writing's like - of an open space making a social gesture - hampered - something about her. 19 Night in the solar plexus anxiety - doesn't have a referent - I'm lying with my hands on it - cudding contacts without getting anything except the sense of London on this trip - Horley village - the bedroom - Josh-u-a. Self forcing [poem list]
Can I face the writing - it's hopeless. [listed according to place and time written]
The high claim and its uneasiness. A sickened feeling about these old pieces. It's been years of squeezing cognitions trying to get into another league.
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