| edged out volume 8 part 7 - 1984 april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
12 April 1984 Kiva - in the center of the floor is a small hole representing the sacred place of emergence of the mythical ancestral twins. Dream - the embryo's nearness to the anus - as if it is in the abdomen like the egg - loose - with the shit pile down there. In Annabel's place - she's got on a ring with two big diamonds - she's getting married on Wednesday - amazed - "Is he rich?" - imagining someone she met in upper circles - I can have the place if I like, can I get a scholarship fast - I could stay instead of going home - when she's gone opening a canister and there's a strip of note curled for me saying how much she liked it when she went to the high gatherings and they were looking at her - a picture of her younger holding her head too high - she's thinner now - her deep rosy beauty - the place is a shabby attic - I see her from a distance in a light new dress having gone to her marriage come out into the street carrying a saw, white with green.
Long cuestas overlooking submerged lowlands Longer elongated valleys mostly submarine are anticlinal, that is, eroded along the axes of anticlines where the rock had suffered tension jointing making it erodable. Active Pass suggests a tear and fold. The Strait of Georgia was a wide valley, the islands were foothills of Vancouver Island mountains - river through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific. Rock scour during the Ice Age. Fretted sandstone Cultures to 300 BC Water washed by water from Strait of J de F is colder, salter, denser Douglas fir, giant cedar, grand fir Garry oak, arbutus/madrona, broadleaf maples on middens or damp places, north slopes hemlock On logged-off land, stands of red alder Western yew, juniper, cedar Dogtooth lilies, camassua blue, sea-blush pink Nootka and pigmy roses, spiranthes, orchids in August, coral root orchid Coast deer Littlenecks, butter clams, horse clams, cockles Rufus hummingbirds, 13 I'm glad we've been living here again - the East Place - my mom says she's worried about me - my hair is dead from the roots - she feels my waist - Judie does - my shoulders are so big, I'm so thick and short - I used to be beautiful - my father inserts that she isn't saying what she means, they think it's because I'm with women - I don't disagree, maybe I'm not beautiful anymore because I'm not with men, but - I tell him passionately - it's women who've been brilliant companions, the men don't understand anything, they're so stupid, they don't see me, it's impossible with them. Even a few years ago there was a man I liked but he couldn't see me at all. Earlier I was woken by yelling at Roy about not keeping his word about Luke. [FE words] On the sand track meeting a long-haired girl, brown, silver, wavy. I look back remembering I've seen her. She's the courtesan. Beside a bank a fox animal I stop to see, black and white on the red, feral. The cauldron boiling speaks. "What is it saying?" An eruption, explosion. I back off. "The cauldron was the fox."
"The immaculate / Cauldron, talking and crackling" in Graves. "Emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance, metamorphoses, and biological racial recall"
"The choirs or roving bands of the goddess" The softness of pleasure seeing Inner body touch / sound, can think in this mode in twilight where language and images will block She was viewing the damage from inside, coming to understand it, then stimulating healing "Through passages dark and steep, in silence" The guardian between talking and younger is sexual, angry, vulnerable, guilty, powerful, self-interested. A spirit, a boy, spontaneous movement, production of images. The heart of the boy in the woman - was pierced.
"Ancient power of fright and lust" "A nearly androgynous figure, the child, the flute-playing blue god," connected to high self In summer when light is longest ... they meet. Raith form wraith, torc wrigian wry - wrycan work - wrath - wrang twisted - writhan - writan - wringan - wyrhta wright - wircan weave - wriggen - wrecan to drive, avenge wrecca outcast - wraestan - wrenc trick - wrenna - writhan to bind, writha - gwrach old woman - wrappen - wrangen to struggle - wrang Scot wrong - wrack of clouds - wraec revenge - wrak wreck - swingan to beat up - swengan to shake, beat "I am in a state to perceive them when I am near the death of the body." As close to death as their art will allow. Hekate was also called phos phoros, day moon. Candles at crossroads when you need the return of the bright one. The image of the event as it occurs. Persons as shades: the one who is wearing the likeness of my friend. Witan to know - wita councilor, witness - wicce - wis - wican to yield - wych - withe
Lamma Island 9000 miles of train to Calais the single braid of the unmarried girl 15 With Sandy at her house, she's out, we're as if in different rooms, nervous about whether I'm slighting her, I set the gramophone needle onto one of the records from in the box, the track they played most, "the world's best loved tune [sketch of shape of tune]. I see the needle is playing a sheet of paper with some varnish stains on it, as if the notes to the record, the record itself is worn out or broken, but I'm looking at the paper with typing on it and still hearing the thin music coming out. Maggie driving the truck, is she going the wrong way, she zooms uphill, turns in the small opening as if on a skid, and shoots into the right road - showing her mettle. It's the road up the back (northwest, Ted Voth's but higher) and goes through an old couple they know, then there's a skilpit baby, "I don't like to see it being given food when it's sickly" and a slattern mother - which of these doors out east - not that one, on the right, that one straight ahead and on a lower level - but I'm not sure, it's the door that takes us onto the field road I want. Where are we going says Janeen. "To Epps, to where Epps used to live." We come to a grove with two stallions, we have to pass. A young French boy is whippy, insolent, then I order him and he goes up the stairs. The last to go up, I'm not sure whether it's horse or girl, four legs in white net stockings. I say as a joke to my friend "It's a double hooker." With Janeen looking at the posted testimonials of what happened then. Looking to see if hers is there - 'the big' - black horse piston. A place where they're using an old orange balloon/parachute to shoot orange mud out of the ground. It swivels like water from a hose - raising money for something - in a shed or barn a wall with boards different people have brought, I think those three are mine but there's a vulgar joke on the, in bent nails, someone else may've - A theatre, cutting around the crowds to go to the bathroom, I just want to get something I left. A partly Negro Weins, I think to be company with her by telling her my delight at the singing in the film, she fades away as if offended. Seeing the moon round and yellow hung under a fir branch in the west. Waking thinking "My puppy is dead," "My child is lost." Fear of the The music is Bach. It's the last song of the death cantata. Reading with a feeling of separating the parts of a concoction. Kindness and patience, the right size and sound, satisfyingly fathered, I speak forward. Titania agitated, fleeing among persons, what am I doing excited in these bushes. Ashamed intently. A ship passing so silent and close I rush out, don't believe. Most of it is sail, a blue square sail, one man, trailing a lot of baggage. It felt to be coming back to - what I was feeling was recognizing - what I have of it is: the sense of seeing something and recognizing it suddenly as coming back to (work); had been doing - and then registering the mode, and the shock waking me out of the mind it was.
Going to the swimming baths, a long slope, like a coliseum, of small hot soaking pools bright blue, some persons sitting in. The big pool on the floor is where I'm headed. A man in Eskimo clothes creeping toward thin ice with a pole. I creep with him, his going right to the rim shows me I can too, and I do. Going back up, a weed at the base. She has been tormenting me about this young woman of the household where she's a tutor. Left with her I'm quite rough, challenge her, seize her breasts, that are hard balls, she isn't a woman, she's a man dressed as a girl so he can go off with his tall boyfriend. The house on Clearbrook Road is abandoned, we'll never be there again. Do you know about polarity? My mother with dark circles under her eyes saying wornly she's glad she had the lobotomy, it has helped her be free and young. I say I did that with drugs but I stopped because I want to keep both minds. The sequence - she doesn't look bad but gets patronized about being tenderfoot - says there's nothing to tell about the birthday party - but is talking to a stranger - "I'm not making compliments but" - then about the porn film and I get furious because she sounds ignorant - start yelling she's trying to stick me with it - she says out of nowhere my armpit smelled like shit, it was the scratching asshole she means - I'm choked with rage taking it as her way of declaring sexual contempt because transferred - find out whether I can pack her right away - she it was a political comeon - I, that wasn't why. Then for the afternoon she's condescending about her recent wisdoms and how she's going to help me now, I yell about Rhoda and people not liking my writing, in a mushy abortive way, doesn't grip, teary, exhausted, the mush is self pity and blaming, I'm going on about that piece, what [Rhoda] said, how wrong it was. "What's wrong with me is I'm hungry and lonely." She says everyone's hungry and lonely, she is, everyone else. But when I say I'm not like Emily far ahead of my time she jumps forward and I jump back, she suddenly saw the loneliness, but her complacence seems predatory. We dig clams, she goes on, little awkward shovel bites, I get out the piece. She reads it and is angry after two pages about, she says, the spacing, though she's thinking, she says, of doing something like that, 'innovative.' Complains it goes from one thing to another, disrespectful. I know the beginning is incomprehensible until after the further understanding, I'm not sure of some of the parts. I lie outside, intense fire in the solar, laid out and then starting to feel I'm going to find out whether she can read it or not, I'll know if her complaint is the true one, I'm freer already, I've had to be whining because of her holding out on this, she's been holding out there because she knows that's what disables, hopeful too, maybe I've written something she can't read, maybe I've got ahead of her. She writes down about spacing - why is she, again - that it's an exciting narrative - yes - and attention starting to go, page 10 foam on the floor - that - frightens me she read that. Then partly guilty and conciliating - she has to have a nap - outside with the sun sloped onto us as we're lying under the red cover, she falls asleep, I fade to the interim, fancying seeing a big carrot in the ground, is that how she sees, in the fadedness do I get to be her - seeing the smoke particles in convecting tissue, falling lightly through the light. An eagle of the boughs. Two wings behind her back. Want to know more, she's snooty, thinks it's enough and then goes on about spacing so insistently I think it's doing something else, but still I'm remembering my own love of it the first time in the presence of someone. Then she's insisting on my lack of self faith - "Why are you talking about my lack of self faith just when I'm feeling quite a lot of faith?" - That's covering something too, interesting. Then she makes a joke about my cologue and I top it inspiredly, and then she makes a very bad joke as if having to win something back - ha, you're showing your hand and it's not less competitive than mine. Then going to sleep - I wake at 4 from the spirit world - she dreams too - I'm angry and have to do some firm hollering - she baits me with lady, I sneer about R's dainty dressing - we find out what is worrying her most in the manuscript. And I too, see how much of its charm comes from her. "You want to take its magnificence for your image." And then thinking what it means - her use of my country - we both doing the same, I knew, and she called it something else - a knot of harpies - working to be honoured in culture. And then to think here as if not still in wrangle. 20 Exhausting self pity, mush. 21 With C in a night room, we see through the window the waning crescent. C says "Look there is another." I see on another of the crescent near it. [sketch] It's frightening as if we're in a spirit world. Then as if a white owl or eagle wing-spread outside the pane holding a round moon. It's again two of one. then C and I floating from a pivot at her elbow, our heads are passing back and forth across each other's view, hers is bald, we are as if imitating the moons. She wants to continue but I see something else come against the window holding something. I want her to shine the light toward it, a small as if bird body, with fine gold chains, in the brief small light it shows skin pattern, green cell outlines, red dot enclosed, a round-bellied tiny body female-shaped like a harpy. Something earlier about eating young people or minds C says. J back in her big house, the water fountain doesn't turn off, warm water wasting, a bush she should let grow to close off the view of the back. Walking on the grounds early before she's up, seeing the maid and cleaner, young women, already up in lit rooms. Taking Judy on a scooter I had left parked with the key in - finding the way through behind J's garden, a housing tract, up a hill, past a church where we gather up some china left on the grass. Going home, coming by Hill Sixty, run out of gas, I've been zooming, we should be able to coast down quite a way, then walk it, there are deep ruts torn in the road, I decide to take one as an easy track, it's then gotten much higher than any rut I've been, it's a wall far over our heads. It was equinox, Good Friday. The phosphorescence. Blue light threading off mussels in the black under the wharf. Submerged flares as off a minnow's turn. Could be stars. To go on about persistently - to foul or seize food, carry away souls of the dead. Rapacious predatory person. - If I believe what I know
Stop being called consort Make it cognitive as it is Death says, what do you want to do hards hurds heordan - refuse or coarse part of flax hergian to ravage - harsh - harridan - harass - harangue - harrow harwe - arare to plow - harper to grip, claw - harpy - harpoon - harpins of ship ribs - harpazein to seize - haren to cry out - hark, cry for hunting dogs - hare to frighten - heort, hart - here - army - harness - harrier hawk, hound - hara rabbit - harmonia - harbinger - harbour - harfest - herba - earm, arm - harmos joint So harpy is talons, hunting, yelling, harrowing. Woke in fear and interested, thinking of Plath and Yeats, the going into symbol world, have I not been doing my own world, is that where it is, dreams like this with C. 22 I am being skewed by envy of the way your writing is received and your popularity, also with my friends. You've earned your authority in writing, it is true authority. I am sorry not to have it but I haven't given it what you have. I would like to come out of the position of envy spoken as blame. I suppose that means taking on envy as simple agony. Also I must stop having time to help you in your muddles, and work for my own authority. The writing you saw - yes it's using your interestingness - and also my 'love' which is to say attention - what I've been in writing has been that 'love' - what you call dilation - making the other exist - Possibly it is a parasitism I must see through - I've been suspecting something like that - but the other thing of making demos of psychic mobility - ostensive combat - I don't seem equipped for - that's on-going. You not less than me and the others are a harpy working for cultural honour and nothing else. The use of you that's in that writing, I have earned and take. It's sore to be without. "I am stronger in myself these days than you are." "I submitted to the discipline these six years." "It isn't that you can't stand the dishonesty, it's that you can't stand your changed status." "You can use me to find out what's wrong with your writing, or what's right." "You rear up." "Don't you want to submit to dismemberment and reconstruction and belong to the group of survivors." Slurs. Fluid mud. All I said was you're as competitive as the rest of us. I have to stop grounding it, stabilizing and correcting. I have to be seeing for myself if it's sense to me.
Until you know something about your own operations in rivalry you aren't reconstituted. I think you've had a false dismemberment. - She's in a euphoria of having gotten away with something. Now she wants 'me' to go through the real thing. I do parasite and like to be near your interestingnesses. Powerpacking your new match. If I'm not also in love I don't have enough fuel. How to remember to see reflection Return accusation immediately and watch How to remember I can say to anyone as if alone, forgetting leftoutness is everyone's How to remember to not fall for the flattery of knowing things and 'helping' and being kept busy I say "I don't know" Not to correct If you aren't also available to change I have to be kept busy fighting your I'm not remembering
Trust that you're vigilant and don't fall for tricks, and that if you love admire are vulnerable desire you'll be honest not to withhold. "You raise such a turbulence." I need you in my writing less not more. She has got some particular agreement from R. Gender is your confusor, what it covers is rivalry. When there is no common understanding. Physical stress / I'm more stoical. Going up helical stairs with two girls spitting blood. I won't be among the loved but among those who work. What worries you most is when I make a good joke. I feel outclassed by your motility and self-liking expressing. What attacks me is your obliviousness. at Rockefeller University by Prof. Fernando Nottebohm. Over the past 15 years he has shown that the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen affect song memory and the size of certain brain areas in canaries and zebra finches. The effect is direct - the bigger the area of the brain, the more complicated the song a male bird can trill. Because surges of the sex hormones occur around the birds' mating cycle, Prof. Nottebohm suggests "that this memory is both seasonal and compart- shown how hormonal that memory is. Male song birds will forget part of their song repertoire when injected with female hormones. Songless female canaries will start warbling after injections with male hormones. the same sex hormones make song memory areas in male birds' brains grow larger than in females. While scientists feel the seasonal and specific natures of bird memory have implications for under- vered female birds growing new brain neurons without a hormonal fix. It had been generally supposed that brain neurons in higher animals were fixed at birth and that their numbers diminished over a lifetime. I was at the same point last year, the constants her movement toward and threat, waiting for him, reading psychology and formulating about writing. Borrowing and raiding. Combat and impressing. Dilation and registering. Desire care and thought, pleasure justice and knowing, health and fertility, good conscience, skill and true description Combat - skill - strategy not meanings - raiding - 'be seen composing' Healing and impressing The disaster times I've forgotten 24 Caudal sprung up to guard the belly. Remember to watch the breath, it isn't until I come to see the shapes that it works, uncoiling, lying easier with arm under pillow. Waking sprung shut again, intense anxiety in solar, breathing into the cramp, shallower breath the fire into the womb or lower in the pubic funnel, what was here - gender and sex - when I thought of writing it was belly pain again - writing and abandonment - then: can I move it into the forehead - in the pubis it seemed to radiate to arms and legs. Treeplanters mobilizing, a planter's truck just newly painted three colors, blue green. I stand beside a truck box the planters are gathering in, faces I know, I say hello but no one sees me. Meeting one of the women asking how they're doing for cooks. "They're very flush." Seeing her standing talking to others - notice her double chin, looking is it just in profile. Smell of the pillowcase, Clearbrook Road 3069. Plaid skirt, short-sleeved sweater. Aunt Lucy's nice figger, the closet with long chenille robes, lavender, pink and blue. The drawers. To a Wild Rose powder, 4711 cologne. Farm. Canyon. Nuts. Her tuche. She's rather cross. Getting saved. Uncle Ben. The milk house handprint. Mickey Mouse for Uncle Kid. Strawberry field, had been stumps and fern, red cedar earth. Nettle hill, corduroy road, swamp jack-in-the-pulpits. Fight about snake corduroy pedal pushers. In the child's way not interested in her person but enchanted by the ordering of the nut trees, the grape vines, her realm. The stairway closet with dried apples, nuts rattling inside cloth sacks. Crawling into it. Ammonia cookies. Red currents in the colander. Rising for family praying. Looking around, an uncle looking stern, but his eyes are open too. A training so (thorough) that when I play my mom a tape of her father saying table grace her lids clam right down and her head bows. Oma helps me get saved. There's a Brunk week at church, sitting with the girl children in the front rows, having a good view of who comes forward in the altar call, it's a week of pressure and after the last evening, a Saturday night, I'm in my cot in the narrow sewing room, Aunt Lucy comes in, she's my usual bed-putter and goodnight-hugger, she sits on my bed and asks if I'd like to be saved. Oma unusually visiting my room at night, it's a formal occasion, and portentous, I pretty well know what's up. Do I want to get saved? It's embarrassing but can I say no I don't want to get saved? I say yes I do. She has her rather knobby hand on me. She leaves me saying she'll send in Aunt Lucy. I think I understand there has been some advising and arranging in the corridor, and she's giving her daughter this important coup and credit, of leading a young soul to the lord. Meantime I have a moment to think. I've resisted the altar calls but now I'm cornered. It can't hurt to get saved in case there really is a hell - if there isn't, there's no harm - so I do what my loving auntie advised - I could do it in my head, not aloud. I don't remember what it was like lying there in the dark with my dolly, when she'd left to tell the household it was accomplished, looking at the walls and sewing machine, in the light from the chicken houses, thinking now I'm saved. But I do remember next morning in the commotion of household dressing for church, meeting Uncle Ben at the ironing board closet where the shoe cleaning box was kept, and he saying "Do you feel different? Isn't it wonderful?" Looking inside myself, into my chest, do I feel different? No. I say doubtfully, "Yes." A conversation with Cousin Ernie, sitting on his lawn next tot he road. He says, "Have you gotten saved yet?" We were understanding each other. He meant: they're after us. With another memory of being caught by Ernie in the big fir, the corner guardian, lopped, standing over the schoolchildren's path running alongside the hardtop of Clearbrook Road. It had a strong limb extending over the path. We could slide down its length and be set gently down on the path. Ernie catches me just as I'm starting to slide down. I have on my Sunday plaid skirt. He's standing where he hopes to see up it, and I can feel my panties are being pushed aside by the branch's needles. I have to twist around and ride down slanted, I can still feel it, to foil him. It's after church and before dinner. He has come over from his house across the road. The house on Clearbrook Road, rather than my parent's house, is the house of ancestry, ceremony, beauty, and marriage. Roses at the window. Civilization. I dream it vacated. Hühnersuppe, fine-cut noodles, after Mendelssohn in church, [*Mozart?] John Suderman's choir singing Ave Verum Corpus, Ingrid Suderman fascinatingly mouthing in the front row. Sunday faspah - like 'vesper' - a late afternoon feast, Akazie Baum stirring its pinnae in majesty, shadows nudging on the cloth, delicious garlic dills in a glass dish, slices showing fine-grained seeds, ham and buns, hers, a lighter crust than my mom's, a little yellower. I hardly remember her from that time but I knew her: the house and its order, the garden combinations, were her, intimately - I knew her as if more intimately than anyone, I was enchanted in her realm. When I returned from my years in England the farm had been sold, the familiar furniture was arranged in a ranchhouse on a lot, and I was changed too, I was thirty and had a child, and I began to know her then, in language, had come to my own definition of the word 'politics.' I'm visiting her, with my mother, this time in her single room in the old folks' home. She'd been winging away on some joke about the plaster mallards three in a row over her bed. I say "Oma sie sind charming. How do you say 'charming'? Ehre Sprache ... ist charming." She says "Na ich hab' zehr viel gelesen." Deadpan. It cracks me up. Bridling, deadpan. When she dies and is there propped in the casket in pale blue nylon dress with tucks and ruffles on the bosom, her chest looks strangely and childishly thin. Where are her breasts? A xerox sheet: a picture of her picture of her mother, her bureau icon, portrait, red lightbulb, china cat, unrolling lifesaver packet, embroidered doily. I write on it Luisa Braun: who spoke well. I meant by that: dear One though you lived in marriage and religion and gave yourself to guarding social propriety, you knew what I knew, that before it, behind it, beside it you were. I fold it and hide it under her knee. It is subversive and a claim: a reference letter. You wouldn't have liked my wanting the strong granddaughters to be your pallbearers. Laughing, rehanging the washing I'd put on the line, there's a right way to do it, and showing me: precisely. Squabbling Du, Peter across the table. Understanding it's their way of getting around our presence. In intensive care naked, shameless, grizzle bush and white belly folds, whole legs. Flirtatious, bridling like a pretty girl, winsome, flattered, innocently sly. Walking her to the glass exit doors at the foot of her wing. Watching them get in the car. I'm told she wasn't always so - the story of her sick overwhelmed years someone else will tell. Perhaps in her fifties, when I knew her as a child, she was harsh still. But in her eighties and nineties she was fun, she was quick, charming, self-forgiving and at ease as if her long survival and his with her had settled every doubt - is it that? The heart attack at 87 scared her, she went on having to tell the story of how the doctor said "Sie hatte ein' grossen Willen." The place we're traveling in has a town we've left and may go back to, I'm the one who was there, I only remember something about ? as if houses by a quay? He's walking so near behind me I'm feeling his warm bone against my thigh every step - is it that? Does he mean to? We're walking as if together in it, he says suddenly "--- will you marry me?" I say in the quietness of arriving, something like "Oh Ivan it seems ---," I don't know the word, maybe 'likely,' but meaning: it looks like that's how it's going, or, that's the truth. I say " but I have to think about it" and then: "No, because in some years you'll be too helpless and dependent." Somewhere also a map of where we are - the peninsula below Laos, 4 or 5 towns, the one I want to go to for the night, is on the coast. 'poem' 'sequence'
alien element and landing safe
[some RA words]
- achieves its native state and lets you intercourse with radiance blue lines hotter, auric light is ultraviolet red light - growth sex lactation healing , blind to, toward blue, violet "to sooth the nerves" pulse relaxes subcortical visual, they don't see but they guess
the geometrical space of vision Kinnell glowing with the astral violet of the underlife 415 nanometer blue light absorbed by hemoglobin in red cells eye loves blueviolet - the plasma
stripped atoms with electrical properties, ions a longing is often for something one has already ultraviolet beyond visible the cell body can read what the eye can't, unvisible knowledge
have we seen it do we fantasies of the aura the images of planets you are a strong sender 'song' it's in sun eyes - hers and his we need to be sheltered by clouds I'm told -
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