| edged out volume 8 part 6 - 1984 april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
April 1 1984 (Violet Willms) maybe going to expel me, I don't work much, expect my cheque to come later; and having one friend isn't right. She goes away for a minute calling ("Milan") to come look at my pictures, he does promptly - I don't want him to see them, they're black and white prints Michael sent, scribbled on, I don't know what they're like - he thinks I'm being coy but I explain it's the slides I want him to see. She comes back. I'm ready to reply. I say there are two things. What I intend is to suggest I show my slides to all of them. "The first is that the way I work seems unreliable." She interrupts, "Let me ask you something. How does it seem to you? When I was young I often noticed that life damaged the most ordinary people." I'm tweaked, shall I ask her what damage she sees, is she the one who can help me with my own question, or shall I be strong and go on to say that when I show the slides they'll see that though I'm disarrayed and timid, my work is there. And I can be less isolated because they'll know me. I wake then.
Many events. I'm in the backseat of a car and see the body of I think Jake, I'll ask him - "Jake ..." - he looks into the car - "what do you do for a living?" He's explaining. Is it something with pictures. But it's philosophy. As we move off and he's running alongside or diverging I think to yell "What happened to your cousin Jake?" But he's gone. Passing the Dillons corner, in the upper room many old people, Jews, at tables looking at me. I pass with my younger person walking someway strangely by (sliding on a stool), one of the old people has come downstairs to call after us - give us a package - maybe it's cake. I'm following a street on the left of the city, north, thinking I don't have any mental map of this place but I always know how to get home; I seem to be coming into industrial streets quite deserted, railways. Behind me there's a high bridge to the hospital or university. It goes left to a shining height. The streets I'm on diverge, they're a wing off-side from the rest of the city I think is there to the north. I seem to have lost my blue t-shirt out of the basket I had hung from my neck, but here's a green duffel bag on the wall, I left some time back - I roll it to put it in the bike basket. It's after that I have to deal with Vi Willms. - Getting out of the van with red velvet seats, the boy, the girl, the ponytail mycologist, the amazement beautiful smiles - like love to the distracted. Released, she could seek those to whom she belonged. - The way I always forget to watch for attack - I don't gather myself as if a meeting is something - whether someway it's my occupation - what is occupation - to be full of - taking? - full of taking note - that prevents me. What happens: I just go vacantly and in defiance - wait to see who it'll be - without competence, that has competition - it says going with.
A (book) called Reading Dorothy Richardson. Only now she writes, it, risking
A spirit would be described spatially. Spatial prefixes
I want to show that reason is there in the dark. Living outside, goes on from living inside - it is not the Other Place. strategies of subversion, ironic deflection ... of the colonized Taking on any vocabulary Subverting by confusion Naming in new areas Creating parallel opposing s/he Going to origin, or archaic, time-skipping Dissolving spelling and punctuation Refusing to work in reference to the tradition Destructing the myths Going as much as possible to the unsaid, the dissolve Going to sound - lack plots, repeat, are dense, focus on epiphanies Elliptic, fragmentation of 'alienation' DR - spells out what her form would have to satisfy - elliptic - episodic - the way it's read, saturate into - claiming experience not in the canon - sentences include, gather in - she locates every perception, thought, point of view is fictional the critical text in its relationship to the original text. There are all sorts of different relationships and different degrees of distance that one can take. One can imitate the text, one can write a text that's inspired by the original text, one can use the language of the text and work out of that same language configuration and write another text. a criticism that works within the language of the original text and where the mode is more one of allusion and potentially of plagiarism in the sense that it actually picks up some of the phrasing and the connotations of the text and works them out. It's a strong form of criticism that moves more in the mode of writing than in the form of setting up an alternate discourse. the matrix out of which the new text is generated, a kernel of verbal meaning which generates new sounds, which generates new ideas. Your connotations rise out of it, and it's the textual matrix which leads to new textual generations, and that all texts in a way are building on texts which already exist. BG Actually it's a building - every text that is criticized is seen as something to build from, it's a carrying-forward of the movement of ideas. DM Things resembling. To Rhoda - nothing you said about it was true. It is light clear precise and warm. It's new thought. You're in hatred and envy. You praise me for what I don't do. You stopped my writing after the first reading, you gave this piece no attention. You saw I'd passed you and thought I'd stolen it from you. You wanted to shake me for saying what's too close to you. You used my color motions. "You said you didn't understand a word of that reading, but your writing is so influenced by it" - you said it twice, it means you think this writing is good and you wanted to slay me. I gave you one of my most loved pots, you never saw it. You used lumpy ones and kept it in the bathroom. Your own writing is too disembodied. Reading in vol 4 the blue green white small pink. Coming to the bathhouse, the green floor, bent wire squares, soft green maple flower canopies drop, leaves jut - wing points - bee bombs - small maythorn scallops, little darker - ladder set into it - I jumped for a dead branch - risked bees - it came antlers for the rooftree. Shadow on, light into, bathhouse, door open, stones, black heater, kettle, enamel overturned, grey wood, cardboard; broom, drift-block door step, stone stop, brown earth litter, little house shape slant into the maple trunk, old divided one dead up the middle, close under on the other side, in the armpit of, thicket hawthorn. The gate - footlatched - a rock - Deer's rump clearing the wire - side move - another standing - both stand and look - I want the gate shut except when I'm using it - deer's grass then, they'll come again - they came though there's smoke. The ewe Elizabeth, high ruff. Cherry tree in the willow hedge on the ditch. Light head over in front of black - fir - I come to from a distance - it's a tree but a grove - three stems at sheep back rubbed red - scaly, but the leaves are soft apple - the heifers staring aligned - whiteface - over the coast trees luminous luminous dusk - no-color. Translucent - orchids - I took - Titania's - perfume - with round-grass - cabin ground sill - deep moss on a barrow [found rare calypso orchids in the moss among rocks] orchus the abode of the dead, orchis testicle Taking the lamp to the kitchen - alright kids, I've done my beauty. 2 If I don't think of it as under - no under - a forming - shape-shift, gesceap, scieppan, creation, sciftan to divide. [SCA words] 3 Being in language is - images first - ex arcere - arca chest - area open space - areola - move - Greek and Old English things - doings - the words seem so alike scrabbelen scramble vowels and consonants, the dialects, loosened, pleasure, sciurus squirrel, the words potential between the words in the lexis - to scoon - the scapos not the phallos - palus stake - palaios old - palere to be pale - palea chaff, straw - corpse penis - palaiein to wrest - pala spade - Sanskrit pali line, canon - pallakos youth - paling - palin again - palisade! - pall - palladium safeguard - Palladium is her statue - "probable origin maiden" - a cloak over, pallium. To put arcs around area - rib prow - red aureole - scrabbelen - sciurus - scooning - scapos not phallos - a state - old Palaios stiff - a pallet - chaff - impale the white wrestler - bury - the pali - young skin Indian boy - palings around - her fort, Pallas. Polus pole - pal stake - polos pivot - pelein to turn - polemos war - polis - polios grey - polish - polites citizen - pollex thumb or big toe - pollin fine flour - polys many - Paul little pole [many pages tracking SC, SK and SH words] [notes on Dorothy Richardson] Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts A sensation - something left back - the landing, writing fast, a seen is held still, the hand runs In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her Her hair's inertia, she stops suddenly, and the air coursing behind her, visible curls in the room gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting Bureau, floor, a polish to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material Tense cone of emotion forward. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until Ricochet, keep it moving she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant's pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. Up out of the drawer, folding colors wing, quick, shuts. It was useless, there was no escape up here. Not in this chapter. Pelted from within and without, she paused in laughter Pelleted, skin, lines of shot. From? with clasped restraining hands. Holding herself as someone. She was chased. The rest of the evening must be spent with people. Is it a memory she isn't going to write. She'll write instead - The nearest. The Baileys. She would go down into the dining room and be charming with the Baileys. Her starlit window suggested the many watchers. The sky looked intelligent. Silently reaching down into the life that rose faintly in her to meet it, the strange mysterious life, far away below all interference and always the same. A mother, a child, from the chest up. Her footlessness. Motile. Social bewilderment. Class anxiety. Her wirbel heard, showing her way of realizing later. There, as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her defense and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come again to her herself, all her own. A crossing of modifiers, she hangs the sentence three dimensionally. The thing ... had come again. She ... always sure. threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous and decisive pattern freely in and out of the worldwide everything. It might be possible to find out all he knew about philosophy. It is only by the pain of remaining free. Perviousness and interest. That she would only remember, without words, something that had come from the pages. For that moment they had been students together. Emerson, Maeterlinck, Shakespeare, Darwin That the first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine They kept up the English of our best period, the 16th century. Tidal difference, trust gone out from me. Hanging onto lights. book she had read lying on the floor by the little beam of the night light. Remembering she's a homeopath. Marveled. A strange joy. an unknown vibrating moulding force ... the darkened room Is that her writing moment, again. Joy is brightness at forehead and back of throat, marvel is the head gaping mouth to brow like a cup. Motile, "one in whose mind motor images are especially distinct." Compresses, mother in bed, a large party distributed almost invisibly in the gloom beyond the circle - teacups passed - all the gentle speech that had sounded since the world began; light spread outward within her, but not herself. I'd have to look at PR, and James, Balzac, Bennett. Her music, her ear, the interest in Europe, rivals. Movement: it's important to her, how when he moves, her eyes move - the rotation of a line in a space - a kind of abstract. Washing in the British Museum cloakroom fantasy of the woman washing beside her. Feeling of things moving and changing in the air that is always there in all conversations. Her premise - explicit satire and protest - she tried - but got interested in what she was interested in. 1913 so joyous as to produce a longing for participation 1. should properly be unpunctuated. Her anxiety like Daph's, I'm alive. Today chopping wood thinking of Sarah realizing it means she got my letter. She lards her stories. She was a murderess. Interest - the being between me and it, space between surfaces and care, cura - the via journey, Roy - can't want to recreate - but give days to her - it'[s only when one's sunk in it. (Her space and light) watch. Ancestor - the useable esprit. On every page a day or group of days. It was a diary. Why she, how, could give up her last 40 years without note. Inscription - written into - the written for the writer. [PN words]
almost, all enclosure, innermost, open sea, pan, penes 5 Carmichael found me in a public building - "I'm very cold" sitting down on the leatherette - his chest - arms around and waking want to go on - poverty - to be touching and talking about something else so the motion shows on my face like a suffusion, and on his, we're both feeling somewhere else - wanting him to be seeing what he does by a gasping of the eyes. Where else am I at home like that. Oh alright I always fancied you, it wasn't good for other things but I should've known what I could do with it. And regretting the driller in his bare skin in his bed, I should have said You're tempting. A conference. We'd meet for nights and do everything. I wouldn't be afraid it's too much, if I had a spell and could know it would be there no less - we could watch time in it - calm certainty spell. The coming being as if already there so that when I relaxed I sat down in it and it came up over my breasts like a bathing suit. What do I know about today - Jam child - I'm hard - Brenda, conscious hard scrolling on her with description - your smiling - is nice the index of vacuum - on the street in black looking angry, striking - Wiebe's book - the sense of steering her about Roy, a bad feeling, phoning him, will he hear my hate - she wants to sleep - she is asleep - hate's a way of being out of it - not with the firm mother - Laiwan in the library, seeing and then listening to her voice without being able to hear it, maybe - from the balcony - where's hate - mouth - eyes - back of the neck under the curve - the neutral gaze I feel sorry for them when they see - no willingness - her gaze I turn from feeling she'll see vacancy - is that self doubt the feeling of her? A small room dark outside - plywood chairs - J blind, Roy hammered - an influence already feeling, J having revised badly, reading in a stuffy voice but looking interesting and everyone intently looking - R and T and I not looking but my hands on the recording machine - they in their oh wow stone - a drink after, pub Roy's choice - Shirin - Stel? - Laiwan - (Renee). [Jam does a public reading with Roy Kiyooka] Stel's touch and look. L's chill. "That's not nearly enough interest." Why C was so stiff after. The look J from the table, when I seemed to be coming up. When it's in the white and there are images and the voice changes. The men laughing. "It was quite a nice reading. It was very professional." "The pauses." "It isn't over!" to Stel putting on her coat and they leave anyway. The bother of what should I be attending - all the ones she can and I can't - a crowd to the pub - L's transparent skin. Her ability in front - Chinese words - how I don't look, now - as if it's gone out of my life into another one I don't look into - that makes my --- sink - the confusion of access and not. Laughing together like newscasters - no the way he laughed at her version - but how it was not quite sense to me - I hear Dorothy in it - competent and at home - I take the door - they left front. 7 Oh today. Emily. In early morning saying. Write something about the hard years at school. There's not much detail. When I see you in your beauty I feel I have no access at all to it. Begin somewhere, grade 5 in the old school, Gail Angen's desk behind me, the geometry set passed back with a note in it, tin, a love note. How was I brought to say it, Gail's body at 11, pleated skirt, strap slippers, white socks, eyes. Am I seeing J look like her? A little goggled, turned upper lip, small flat nose. Would she sometimes get highest in a test, at that age. Maybe yes. I was brought somehow to give tribute, I wanted to say I worshipped but I wanted to keep back. My pride has to keep me from acting like a cripple. I am brought to say. She writes me a note, I reply "I think you're a very cute person." She replies "You're a cute person too." I am very hurtable, do I believe her, I know I am, but does she think she's being kind to me. It's on years of separatedness. Gerald, Gail and Donna, Sharon, Myrtle, Bernice, Raymond, Elfreda, Walter, (Edith). The grade 5's on the window side. It's the grade 1 place. I wanted to worship but it was lameness put me in a position where I was wanting to, so pride had to master me if I was to have my position. Who is she, she's pretty, she's bright, chewing paper, reading in the desk at recess - outside on a log - removing herself - how did they. It's lameness makes me love - what I'm saying is - love so mastered by pride. Geometry set. Miss (Yukola) Boyd's hatefulness. Crying in the morning by the heater, I don't want to go to school. Her hard red cheeks. Does everyone struggle in that way to master love. Diary and Al. I love him but I mustn't show it. Was it true. I don't know. Love is too easily conned. Wanting to worship and worshipping and refusing. Janeen let me. Oh Nancy Hunt. Thin hair permed, Toni permed. Last years of the wilderness. Despairing crying at the tin heater, putting on underwear and brown stockings over. She wasn't often like that. Snowsuit in the cloakroom. Underwear had garter tabs. She liked school. He on the woodbox in despair. His life is going by, he's a fine young man, 34. 29-35. Resistance and shame. They hate me. [Praying] Please make them not hate me. After Miss Boyd's year, her beautiful love [Eunice Boyd]. A person who was a complete body. Walter Pol was a mis-made person scrawn shrivelled with big ears standing out, thick glasses. Some story of having put a pea in his ear, a run not bright in school. But I was quite alright, good eyes shiny hair bright and alert, only, I had a thin leg and limped. Imagining Luke with a disadvantage, he wouldn't adjust, he'd refuse, he knows he's a high quality person, he won't act like he's less, he'll assume the position he was meant for, and hold it, alone if no one grants it. In grade 4 I came back from the hospital with a cast on. They had sent me a walking doll, the Junior Red Cross, a shoebox wrapped. I opened the end of it in the dark under the ward [Christmas] tree and pulled out a doll, a walking doll, red shoes, white socks, a little blue-green dress with a sheer apron, brown hair. A passion hugging her, I took her into my bed, left the shoebox as if unopened under the tree. The love I felt for her. Her two stiff good legs, her creaking walk stiff from the hips, her sweet face, sweet calm. Taking the doll home and having her with my old doll Rose. The way I am with her, Violet, like people who've been away somewhere together and been through a startling intimacy no one knows at home. An intimacy no one at home knows. Looking at her. A way of looking at her. 8 'Prose' prosoidia Beat. Rarefactions and compressions. Fluid dynamics. Grid to show variance. Rhythm regular and irregular. What does regular do. 'Focus.' Alternative by syllable, 'duration.' Languages differ in their selection and emphasis among universally available phonetic elements and modes of combining them.
The syllable. In polysyllabic utterances a slighter pulsation within a larger stretch of sound produced by sustained abdominal pressure, a single pressure of the smaller intercostal muscles. Constriction and vibration
Dilation or holding, contraction and interruption The larger the unit the more important intonation. A composite group is thus a hypotactic inclusion of two or more potentially independent groups under the (dominance) of the contour and nuclear accent of one. The independent form of a single group is marked by full, if condensed, presentation of a complete intonation contour; in the included form, this contour is reduced to its accentual nucleus alone, and this in turn reduced to secondary rank or (suppressed). Can't speak about the relation of two of anything without making it They've insisted on gender because it was their paratactic series, or relating systems hypotactically ordered internally and their masses or characters in any way balanced or 'measured' against each other such elementary balancing A half line with the halves different Renaissance and Greek meters, Shakespeare used Chaucer's pentameter. (Rhyming 'accentual-syllabic'.) "Their instinctive feeling of comfort within it." Iambic or pentam - by shifting and adding stresses boldly. Spring rhythm was Medieval and Renaissance, overstressing. "Spatial cadences" of e.e.cummings, incremental variation of Stein and cadenced syllabism of Marianne Moore What I want to do or know in meter - the snake poem - the way it was dancing close to the wind - their occasions. What 'distance' does it stipulate? Is that a question? The broken stone; each carrying away half; remembered at home. Symbolon. You are - the avocado - "the half-coin carried away by each of the two parties of an argument as a pledge" - standing for, when seen alone, both - something that is there, with something that is not - to the listener. "An idea which would be difficult, flat, lengthy or unmoving when expressed prosaically and by itself may be made intelligible, vivid, economical and emotionally effective" by the use of - etc. Professional writing and why I don't want those kinds of attractiveness. Word and magic - having to do with - what else the word does - magic being what is done without "In which the upper line is carried by the solo voice or instrument" - the line in light, and the others - why in hymns there are 4. The psychoscope. Timely - myth linguistic experiment erotics forgotten areas (of history etc) Alliteration not initial - submerged - parallel or crossed systems of - fallow deer were feed - or eye alliteration. Ambiguity and multisign - what happens in reading time The reasons Emily's influence - (from symb. Whitman selfconf) Emerson colloquial and metrical freedom - "the Puritan view of" "man and nature" (Metaphysical - love death god frailty - imagery needing to be thought - "devouring all kinds of experience" - scholastic philos - new science - formal religious medit - ranging metaphor) As if time's over - she speaking - as if she's succeeded and thanks - the last person I wanted to kiss was - the kick I wanted to just stay doubled over - then waking with it and going up, thinking of hate actions - rhodent, erhoded - kicking and lighter, it's thin early morning, but in the end as if offering nook she doesn't want. In my room sad - she says it's body - "I was yelling to you to make me come" - the 'you' confuses - you would leave - "I don't want us to separate" - trying to get her to say she wants to go there - listening all the time to whether she is saying that. Confused holding under it my wish - though I say it too - I want I want real body love - your real distinction is that you don't think that way - untouched Her flooding thought Why am I in that time again, elementary school She heard the cries and came down, crying to see me cry, poking the forehead. 9 For summer I could - go after Tetrault - advertise - go north.
A legless man might do the sitting dance. [National Geographic photo] The round hall of the Happy Year Concentric patterns in multiples of nine Anguish, which tortures and terrifies the spirit Character how I'm engraved
The kebiyar of young boys Touched a gong as if by accident. A thin, sweet tone escaped. At the sound something waked in the eye of the dancer - wonder at this musical sprite which leaped from the brass bowls. He released another note from its brass prison. Then another. His eyes sparkled with joy and discovery.
The idea of intervention is the cord. Heart-string.
symbolon, tessera - the two-part broken stone - carrying away half microtubules in the cell - store memory - oscillate in unison - molecular electronics leave behind the symbolic of fertility, Brossard etc, for "real presence in language" - the neurological - the white - "mastery, control and distance" vs the unashamed beauties of fertile universe. [more CR and SR words] -Blew into town and came onto 3 of the people who'd been yours - a hero I'm meant to be the easier form of - if she's the elder, for her I'm the usurper - I'm the twin of her intimate. The reason I won't garden with you, even taking down the fence you're every moment working to subordinate. You are the figure of Refusing - castration, to expurgate, as a book - caste - castigate to chasten - castus pure - chaste - to refine - Control - the self hater What he does not want is to sacrifice his castration - his difference - castration means pleasure refused You practice abolishing - is it the same as castrate - bolos clod - ballocks - bole ray of light The 'father' does it
And the figure of the Refused
Dead father, murdered family
Hell realm
So free of hostility yet so full of vitality When the satisfaction of the subject finds a way to realize in the satisfaction of everyone We introduce him to the language of his desire, the language in which he is already talking to us. Although there are thousands of symbols all refer to one's own body, to kinship relations, to birth, to life and to death. The primaries They operate, speech communicates what it does not say.
I wanted her to be transitional to my writing but it hasn't succeeded. The worst would be that I've given my years to making her transition. She has graduated. I'm left behind. I'm at a zero without lovers friends or established work, Luke, money. What to do. She has a notion of debt and will try to help me for some years without wanting me. A notion of skill. She wants me to leave town or get married. She'll go on quite a while thinking she's still with me. Can she actually help me. Do I want to stay. How to come out with work. [sketch of ship] Some had not seen their likeness before and made remarks of admiration, disappointment or awe. 10 Getting off the bus in the East End, going to Jam's in the morning, I meet Trudy getting on it. 'Interesting.' Roy fat and sick. Waking thinking of Nancy Hunt killing herself - "Sukarno feed our people" - she accepts she isn't a man - I accept what? that I can't have a lover? - that I have to be alone? - is that the version that would reconcile me? - if my voice didn't impersonate beauty? - both your mother and Akbar saw me better than you, because you wanted to use my confusion - giving a clear vibration - you've trapped me in an illusion, what you believe about our relation and what is felt to be so, incongruent - "that you wouldn't be able to have a normal life", but I was attractive in other ways and they hoped too. The way your friends are about me - Anna and your relatives. If it's that I have to be alone - how would I come to it differently - I have come to it already - different times, Sexsmith. Sandy: that you choose people with something wrong with them. Should I call a meeting T you suck - you sucked Paul to get that apartment - you sucked me to get peace in this one - you suck your family in piety - not saying to Diana what you know brings down the whole community - you've succumbed to the economic pattern - not saying what you actually thought of my show - the uneasy pleasures. The mirror makes me think them blind She's their queen, she's a stronger mixture, why do they make her mourn her inferiority. Your bad leg Tom Raworth I cannot love her, the weight of my thought of her misery may add the grain that makes her sad. Open the hidden heart in wars of mutual benevolence, wars of love - a hetaira - hetairos companion - educated slave for freewoman - heteros other Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing You won't hear any other story from me; this is the story you demand. Critics of the given body Clubfoot Orthos Dionys without tribe oral teaching of the faery tradition Nancy Hunt blurred crying - the hotel - poem - a light circling the foot - the woman walking away - footsteps - the shadow limps - the spirit is uncertain of - have a good look - he isn't whole you know, he's gimpy, he - Indicating his twisted leg without bitterness, as if it belonged to all of us It may be a question of distance kept from the physical center of pain (sex, pain and pleasure centres close) Breathing and anguish associated forever Children born in the colonies: an atmosphere of intense fear. The life of the child is contaminated in that atmosphere. So far as there is an open wound there will be contamination. The way she made it so. Ungratified / worship / hate The special sexual needs which are rarely conscious sense of inferiority from not having pleasure [sketch of boot] The heart of the boy in the woman was pierced Strength of their instance means knowing herself as hetaira The tragedy incurred when you join the hetairae, you lose your child. I watched understanding that this was what existed. It was just that I could see it. I want to know that I won't desert myself again. Speak Athapaskan. Navajo. In the turquoise that adorned the entrances of their houses they saw the depths of clear sky.
Elf councilor Calypsos are fairy slippers [sketch of Balinese headdress]
Betony When I'm by myself I seem to go through a series of doors, changes in texture Hillman "the image of the event as it occurs" Weavers, tailors - because of their work? Can I think of it as ballet, teaching it to flow and also to stop and pull
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