August 12 1979 Valhalla
- Larry and Betty-Jo on bicycles and fixing ours, she rushing to talk.
Invites us to supper and he jumps the battery. "Thank you for doing
the dishes."
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- Evening. J was calling. Confirmed. Knew by love and draw.
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- 13
For supper at Epps. Judy about the steak dinner. The strong-featured
baby who asked to come onto my knee to see out.
- Watching myself allow the bad clown to say whatever comes, with Judy
and Michael, Akash and Luke, using eyes curiously or incuriously. Skirmishes,
coincidences: Sarah's letter, the necessity to go to dinner at Mary's,
and to wear the blue skirt.
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- His eyes on some part of me, ankles, dancing offensive leg. Mine dispatch
him, say I know what you think but you can't stop me.
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- Decoration for Michael who tells good tales and played with the baby,
whose brown and strong expressions.
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- Allowing first dislikes. Judy telling how she and Paul would walk home
from school together in Sexsmith. He courted her with nonsense, on the
street in Grande Prairie twisting into a cripple. She still laughs.
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- Familiar, skillful off centre, they like me.
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- Opened Mary's book idly while she was talking, to "the pressure
of Ellie's expectations." Closed it.
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- Luke in bed, net curtain, cream pink evening, and a quarter of the
bush. Some insects, maybe mosquitoes, butting it from this side, a moth
from outside. Luke's fight with Tommy Tregenza, "With your best friends
you fight till you get it to the best level, like Kit and me."
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- I'd like to remember phrases, didn't I use to.
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- "Did you fight with Kit?" "Only once, then he knew I
could take it and I knew he could take it. He was older than I was but
he didn't mind."
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- Last night - is this meteor shower time - I woke to see the half moon
moved west. It was straight down the path when I woke in Luke's bed and
came out. In the morning it was above the poplars.
-
- I was touching myself, began to swirl as if the chest lay still on
the pillow and the pelvis rotated right to left. I thought to allow it
and then chanced the touch to less regular. Have wondered where instructions
come from.
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- Pale yellow green in the fields now.
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- Looking at everyone as contemporary.
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- It's there.
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- "Stop." "No," shake.
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- Mary Sieburt's radiance. Mary's intensity. Are the women happy.
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- Exact description.
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- Task:
- simple glad existence seems obviously to be it.
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- Except for 'the unfortunate'.
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- Knowing about.
- Making a book or film.
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- Evaluating lives: it seems wrong to try to decide from the outside,
would seem a carelessness with what was given, as if believing there'll
be more.
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- Seems part of the rules to believe there's one and it has to be made
as well as I can, with what I got, for Luke and the other connections which
don't have to be made but felt as if they should be maximizing.
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- 'Thoughtful.' 'Playful.'
- Not like them.
-
- Watch for the instructions. About body, staying out of worst social,
companion.
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- Penelope was weaving.
- Mornings at her table. A white marble windowsill there to her left,
the distance is important. It's a clean room with nothing in it but her
table, the window. She glances left, throws her eyes across a well between
table and broad sill, where the sun burns down into the stone, irradiates
the edge of the diagonal.
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- At the end of the room another window with green and blue. The windows
have no glass and are on the second floor.
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- Next to her chair, on the floor, a jug of water. What she's doing is
writing.
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- "A consciousness of matter is present in any matter" - a
fetus, a rock, a blade of grass, a nail.
- Lump, lump, line, line.
14
- Light the lamp, set it on the verandah rail. Typing parts of Eckhart.
Grumbling to you before sleep. Realizing horizontal to space.
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- -
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- Grass, nettle, the color of gas lantern light - no it's the grass,
brick, stone, with the black clear behind it, it's the black of no thing.
The one young tree. I've been young today. Moths rapid. The top of the
tree in shadow and moving more. Webs. Breath steams. A line of web was
shining between me and the lamp. Moth doing something on the raspberry
leaf, wings blurring.
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- The spider went up between two stars on the dipper's handle. There's
Ezra, toenail clicks, shook herself and went in.
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- Luke, my bun's in his oven, he's metaphorical.
- "What's the voice you talk to yourself in."
- "It's just ordin ry."
- "What does it say?"
- "'What's he saying that for, what's he doing that for, when's
he going to stop this stupid nonsense.'"
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- Lying in the dark looking at the Milky Way I saw outer space, realized
the galaxy was something I could see. So that's night, when the distance
opens.
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- With Luke looking through the camera. "I'm going to crash."
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- Then, could the eye see telephoto? How? And then: yes, interpolation.
A computer could do it. But only from information it already has, it couldn't
see what a telescope would, only the scale, sparser. Then: seeing into
the galaxy, not constellations, bearings.
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- Oh magpie white black through blue, the tail's round procession follows.
It's a pale sky. They're in and out of the willow, it's China. In the saskatoon
bush.
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- No, if it had all correct information it would know more than a telescope.
Thoacdien.
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- A wind from the east flowing under the left nostril.
- A wind's stroke that I feel only under the left nostril.
- Variable ripple, cool, oval flutter
- under the left nostril.
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- Scrapes, grass edges.
- Grass edge scrapes another.
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- Another sound makes a tree downstream, higher.
- Last night I heard a continuous dark sound with leaf edges, rounded
lines turning over in front of it.
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- Indicating space, how far the grass is past the nose.
- 3' but without a number.
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- Sunday and Monday love, Tuesday hate.
- Did it begin at Sieburts, thinking of his jeer.
- Adult men making theories. The Oedipus story is a father's hatred of
the one sharing his wife's body.
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- So this is not the body you'd choose if you were a woman,
- why do you take it so personally?
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- Praise Eckhardt, nothing so fine as what they say about him, he Paul
and Augustine, praising the father and the son, the soul leaves the lap
of the mother and smiles upon the heavenly Father, becomes a son who by
being a son is a father. Dorothy in church enraged by the unsound premises.
- Disliking you in your scholastic effort, praise him in order to praise
yourself, ancestry, Borges. Each ancestor gives you many more, you believe
your work is higher class, mind technology.
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- Is there a bottom to this.
- What's this mood.
- Are you raging.
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- A long white marble room with a green pool under a louvred ceiling.
- Walking around the pool.
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- Why am I holding that room as a house while this house is here. What
was the smell of the perfume in the phone booth and later when I was here
at the table, was it you near someone.
-
- -
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- "I thought it was going to be my kind of day, and then at the
last moment ..." "He came along." "... and it was almost
completely his kind of day, or, well, I did one thing for me."
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- How is it, rebellion: you don' know what you had, I'll take it away
forever. I'll miss you, things to tell you.
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- Summary of a thought in no one's voice, Mary does that, other women
here. It makes a mask speak, they hold it forward, they speak as if from
a face held 18" in front of their own.
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- Speaking to Diana, confusion, heard myself laughing nervously, who's
this, "Jam's not here, she's fled away to Edmonton." Explaining
my defeat, planning how to name it: she wanted someone else - we didn't
take root - we were finished - it was completed - we wanted different things
- she had hay fever. "There was somebody she wanted to try,"
suggestively, to T. I was telling Diana, Daphne, T and C and R, refusing
Josie the details, Sandy and Esther were hearing about it. To Sarah it
was "There are some funny problems." "I want her for my
sword mate."
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- Lying on my back under the stars, roof corner and edge and then the
distance. Fouiller dans le detail. I understood that night is a
different horizontal, and was upright looking outward toward the edge of
the galaxy. Gravity was sideways through the length of the body. Humans
glued to the big sphere. Also it was daylight out there, not in shadow.
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- Mutation of night.
- But if space then not time. Visible impossible.
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- 15
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- Without Luke. Hot sun. Lethargy until 1. Touch myself and that makes
movement. Upstairs to see whether I have something about seeing the galaxy
from a traveling sphere, ie making the stars stand still.
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- A divination for August, they're pressing on me, and that they can
be together sooner than I can, and in hot child red banner riding [the
Sun card, liberty].
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- My coloured pleasures and strengths are the familiar ones, solitary,
no thrilling friends and you again only after a while. M says J phoned
last night in distress about Sheila Watson [her thesis supervisor] and
Darwin. "Attacked."
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- 16
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- Morning at Tony Tiller's, Holst's planet's unheard, Luke reading comics.
Penthouse forum.
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- "Tired, in my warm blankets, with Mummy next to me, talking."
- "Do you know what I wish for more than anything in the world?"
- hadn't been listening carefully - "I wish you and Roy would live
together, with me."
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- -
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- What is this sense of one continuous, the Ellie story, place, friends,
according to pattern, everyone has a childhood someplace, then the best
friend, first love, mature work, Judy, the other cities and lovers etc,
ideas, toward an own accomplishment and death. Summary, working to imagine
that in other people, all moments to be refelt. Miriam's story more believed,
legendary people. They seemed not to be in that sequence.
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- "My work has nothing to do with my life,"
- she said as good policy.
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- holding hovering in itself in its simple extent,
that is, god
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- The Eckhart who, preacher, gives himself to his job but loves to find
words for what it is like to be alone watching himself. Because he loves
it he makes it his religion, and that's his mysticism.
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- Intuition under intuition,
- but what are they if it's a public performance.
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- Somewhere in art process a listening to the world, they must -
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- was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanded
time set within a human's time and vision
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- looked at the still open whole of the work
in progress
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- swing yourself up to it, into the void
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- private door which the soul has into divine
nature
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- It tells how the angels marvel at a soul being
in a body. They say we want the soul to be god's mother and his brother.
We must be god's brothers, seeing we stepped out of the same exemplar,
and taking each other by the hand presently shall step back and be make
up again to one.
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- His beautiful shapes, sitting bare legs on the carseat one knee horizontal
the other vertical.
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- "Implied." "I know what that is."
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- Take you to Akasha's, she invited you for the weekend. I'm left
- Abandoned. Angry with him. Depressed. Oblivious sorrow.
- Build Dianna's room.
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- Go there for Michael's warm heart and see his hand on the cup. Judy:
"Michael asked me today whether I thought you'd ever commit suicide."
They are shocked when I say it would give my father too much pleasure.
- So now I know I'm depressed.
- At the table: I'm not seeing them. Was it realizing that even in Vancouver
I won't be able to go into any arms that know me.
18
- Waking in the kitchen, head toward the door.
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- Rained at night.
- Lay asleep in the afternoon, woke stronger.
- An official depression, experimental.
- Washing bedroom wood. No sense of future life in it.
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- Through the afternoon began to wonder about living in Vancouver.
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- Richardson and Lessing, anchor work in sense of whole lifetime. Doris,
Dorothy. Martha, Miriam.
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- -
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- In the night, sleeping outside, head toward the kitchen door, lightning's
white instant, what I can see in it. Once long enough to see the bleached
poppies. Said, you should examine something, work. No.
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- Everything in work, resistance. Any idea for filming or taking sound,
I forget or refuse, as if in a sulk. In hope imagine that work is still
underneath, what do I do lately, and always the despair patterned into
the reading. Holding back in all exchanges, restless disliking, 'thinking'
referring to the open time. Is that the dot in the nature of time, getting
ready to swirl again where it's open alive terrifying and I wish for the
voice to write sentences believing they know where they are.
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- You is Cheryl, and what do you want. Talking to you. The worst is that
you feel your birthday and in competition. What would anniversary be, the
real anniversaries remember themselves.
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- I want everything changed, and to know where I am in it. Was it conversion
to a way.
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- For according as anything is more like something
else, it pursues it more and more and it is swifter and its course is sweeter
and more joyful and the further away it goes from itself, the more unlike
itself it becomes
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- Working in the bedroom, building, sense of the acid clearness of interesting
time, was close; fearless right speed.
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- J, the mix, my saint disciplines seemed foolish to her, and she could
be at centre without them. Not helplessness again! Protesting to her, dreaming
of repentance, revival, father asking to be forgiven, light in our souls,
by obedience. And then thinking of that helplessness that it must be wrong
for a human who can balance.
- And the 'work', is it? Or is it the slavery, bent, about what is local
and what is a life and what isn't.
- I want to go back to it but unfrightened.
-
- But is it you want me for something. The life in it without. The crude
sociality, dope, annexment.
- Knowing how to fight for every moment.
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- This was preparing a rearguard.
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- trees clouds flowers and light which were
like presences from another world
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- Commented, jeered, criticized every move.
- Control by the selfhater.
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- Often thinking of how I corrected from outside.
- Other people as morality play. Exercises in perception (them).
- Sights, envy or rejection makes at most pleasure in the exchange, it
doesn't build them other than their presence. Happy or furious, grieved.
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- With Luke I've been making stupid jokes, playing stupidly, hoping to
get by.
- Want to believe.
- This is trying to make summaries.
- These thoughts are present and only fear keeps it muffled.
- And know everything I know.
-
- In the elations of them I thought moments were understood, which weren't
and then I was silenced by disappointment and didn't fight.
- But what there is now is, still, wanting exactness to make a stronger
memory and incident.
19
- Heard the rain coming by a sound from the south.
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- Into Lessing to be someone else.
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- Realizing I'm failing? No, doubt.
- When she telephoned I was lost in misery, resistance, helplessness,
although when Michael and Judy are friendly I brighten.
- She was pudding stodge, hopeless.
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- Helmer had left the shovel in front of a stone and candy to court Luke.
When I took flowers there the sky above was -
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- And then stopping at the creek feeling the love in the plants, details.
The creek has life this place doesn't. Then the owls coming low to look
at me in the grass. They'd come low from behind my head.
-
- -
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- Moment with Judy saying we'd read about talking to animals. Able to
make jokes, remember. Then at the creek I could feel the marveling one
going carefully, seeing, along the creek. Thought I must know the creek
again.
-
- But this house, what happens here, hanging in the house, where has
all this time been, 'working' because she does, without the energy to see
and think.
-
- I wanted to strengthen the slight time I was there, couldn't stay,
for restlessness, anger, mosquitoes. I could see the owl's feet and markings
of feathers, owls, just to see you, not catch, only strain after, hold
after your glance out of your curiosity and mine, curiosity, and what sort
of organization of important time is that, everything met, without prejudice,
yes, if it's right and I'm not hungering for the you that will be me, it
has to come to that.
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- Reading Lessing in the afternoon, naked, water running down my chest,
oblivious, thinking can I make in myself what I wanted you for, both you,
and be done with longing and have occupation. There's sorrow and anger
in it, what are you good for if you won't be in me with me, and then it
could be anyone and myself talking to myself.
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- Animals who'll only be seen by those who know how to greet and find
them.
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- Technology for not panicking while steadily moving into the new. "She
made herself." In Lessing the complex relation of self to self.
- And what I innocently keep wanting is to be simple and fast.
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- Giving up the devices that make the outside real.
- By accident doing the right thing.
- Suspicious of afterlife, that this is.
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- The coyotes. A red light and a drone crossing the grand green band,
a red light and a song traveling together that way beautifully. Are as
sheet clouds.
-
- What do you want.
- I'm in trouble.
- What's your trouble.
- I miss you.
- What do you miss.
- I talk to myself about my soul.
- You're not popular.
- I began to love you because I was going to love you.
- What does that mean?
- I don't know. That it was set up, this'll be the one. All the wrongs
that didn't put me off.
-
- Is the only kind of writing that isn't wrong, exact description? Then
what would talk be?
- Less. Looking.
-
- You've often been amiable.
- What was talk?
- Verifying the new perception.
- But what's next after finding you inside.
- Making it the same. Anything can be taken to pieces.
- And when it's same?
-
- 20
-
- The sky early is in clots. Still.
- Ezra comes for a bare greeting.
- Suddenly a colder wind.
-
- This is a day for working, marking Lessing for people who don't know
the background. Washing the car. Putting all the eagerness into pleasure
of cleaning but with a double sense and noticing it. Make moves without
seeing either, or else holding still refusing. No there was no either.
Moving fast banging.
-
- [Jam returns with her friend Esther and Esther's daughter Dianna]
-
- Story of the mouse poison. She was alarmed and wanted to know the cost.
- A person offering a person, this and that, I could move it around,
trusting my preoccupations to be interesting. What does Michael do differently.
- I'm not right, location is familiar but when I refer to it why do I
feel I'm lying.
-
- Coming around the corner into the driveway from seeing Betty-Jo sad,
was it there to stop? Wondered if it were like old heretics feeling this
can't be so, or partly feeling it. Not being there in those happenings,
but yes, there, not as a person although some person got me there, saw
evening, your face disintegrating. Luke left alone but coming to sit, Luke
under the table and you joining him when I made bread and the others went
somewhere away.
-
- Skirt - defiant, Tato story, a wind from all directions lifted them
'til they slept.
-
- -
-
- Paradise and the mouse poison.
- Thought, if you put out poison are you giving up paradise.
-
- Entrenched, what's this entrenched, its rationalizations are simple,
obviously foolish, and when I set them away the stubbornness is still there
and I seem to accept as if it is instinctively accurate though all its
reasons aren't.
- And yet don't trust it, the turn, I wondered if there's a 2 year turn,
it's like then and as then falsely hard.
- But what holds the hard. Reasonability that strong lying defense, but
what. The tarot forecast.
- I said I was willing but now I'd like to make a winning and not a losing.
Wondered what letting out the refuser would tell me about what I haven't
been angry about. It isn't any of what I speculate.
-
- Bitter. My goodness doesn't turn you on? Right, you'll like this better,
and then it will be done. (Is that where it's wrong? No that's where it
waits.)
-
- Holding out against direct killing, and yet the mice with strychnine
boiling in their stomachs rushing crazed with pain to water.
- Mouse droppings on the counter and table, walls with feet in them.
Yes, walls with feet in them.
- I want you to learn something.
-
- If I kill mice the creatures will no longer speak to me.
- Although they kill each other.
-
- Speaking to each other so formally. "Do you always talk to each
other like that?"
-
- Doin' well / makes everything indifferent.
-
- Consciousness is not a stream, it holds still.
-
- Poppy crystal wall, unfolded edges like paper, angular shadows.
- It stops at dark. Streak.
21
- With Esther there outside, cooking. Sustaining a someone talking about
cars, looking meanwhile at the face and body. Dianna comes down in red
silk shorts. The kids and Esther go swimming. We talk about our thoughts
in the meantime, 'Foucault,' work, pleased, and at the window touch like
new lovers.
-
- Helmer comes, "Or maybe it's Miss."
- The 2nd part of the Tato story not inspired.
-
- 22
-
- Esther going looking for love takes them to the pool. We get them after
an afternoon talking, in Luke's bed, about what's next, space and time.
Hamburger at Seven Lakes, Ezra finds a bone. Evening to Valhalla for the
mail.
- I take pictures of him talking to Kit, he and D in shorts looking in the Co-op window.
- The light is fine.
- We make a bed on the porch because of rain.
-
- 23
-
- On the porch, rain at our feet, persistent.
-
- Rain, breakfast in the kitchen, fire. I play the sexy tape for mischief
and energy. Luke is playing with the alarm clock, J is turned on. We go
to Hythe, the Treasury Branch, tire shop, grocery store. They come home
with gum and comics. Set the tape recorder in with them in the next room.
-
- In the evening J reads them Cadmus, Actaeon and Narcissus. Luke likes
it, I like it and am thrilled several times in the day by the sight of
you.
- Luke cries wanting to sleep with Mummy. It's set up upstairs. I stroke
his head and then hold you until we nearly sleep, feel the little bones.
- Dream densely, Assurbanipal, can't remember.
-
- Exhausted at night.
- Make lemon meringue pie and plum pie and potato salad.
24
- Waking all, it's bright, we are kissing and squirming. They go wild,
especially Luke. Dianna cooks breakfast.
-
- I take them to Mary, they run behind the swather. I don't bother talking
to M, J talks about the children. I ask if she wants to make the film,
she says she'll take a risk, she says she's been full of love since Edmonton.
-
- When I come in hard pushing past the cut-off, poke poke, I saw Miss
Tahiti. Played bolder, "Let's do something kinky, pretend you're a
girl and I'll put it into you and you'll like it." She felt a current,
or said so out of spook. Then when I said "When I came with Trudy
it was like that," stop, shock, "You lied to me."
-
- "I didn't." We're back to the defender and the complainer.
She says "I want you to think about ...." I start to eat and
read Lessing, drink coffee. She goes for the kids. It makes me write Olivia,
suspending her and whatever it was.
-
- They come home with a duck's head and wing on kitchen paper towel paper.
J reads Phaeton, and then Atalanta. Without our current of love it doesn't
work. Dianna complains of Luke, "He pushes me," and it seems
she's rivaling him and looking for a way to use it with us.
-
- 30
[We drive to Vancouver in the Lark.]
- Beginning when it was dim, part of a red sun, rapid packing.
- To Dawson Creek the mist beautiful, hay forms.
- At breakfast we're high. I change from last night's dirty clothes.
-
- Drive out of town high, singing her wartime romance songs and Oklahoma,
South Pacific, Dancing cheek to cheek. Her lovely small voice.
She's willing, willing, to sing. Dianna's Elvis songs don't work.
- Luke singing Brown girl / in the rain / tra la la la la la / she
looks like the sugar in a plum.
-
- The car creeping up gradients, I'm listening anxiously.
-
- Ugliness of Dianna pushing Luke sexually. They talk dirty. When we
put them to bed together in the car, doubts, hysterics.
-
- Distress and accurate action. Make the chicken, potatoes, beets, fast,
cheerfully. They are read to by candlelight on our sleeping quilts in the
rain shelter. Ezra and J about the taken chicken.
[Boney M 1978 Brown girl in the ring]
31
- Began at the campground. Tired. She made breakfast. Ezra called me
to it.
- Unwilling to speak when it was time to.
-
- [visiting Jean Waite in Williams Lake]
-
- Coming down to the two log houses, looking into their shine and order,
nasturtiums in the garden, thrilling. Preeminent tea.
-
- Swimming, learning to arch the back up. Supper's beautiful good food.
Philemon and Baucis. [Jean] "My inspiration, when I was about seven
I thought I would try the second volume. I remember sitting out on the
swing in the afternoon. That was the first story, as if I'd been waiting
for it."
-
- 1 September
-
- Woke in the car, a hard night. Luke and D silent in front of cartoons.
Jean and I struggle on, Jam silent.
-
- When she drives she rocks, I'm in an agony of nerves, can't stand it
and am grouchy, eat apart, blame her for being the silent presence and
letting me work. She's fascinated by house and marriage, I'm nowhere except
for the freedom to be bad. Then I drive, but badly.
-
- - It came out about coming along to 'help' me.
-
- Mood turns, into fast accurate movement. At night after eating next
to the closed restaurant, in the dark and rain trying the canyon. Turn
back in fright. I reconnoiter and find, in the old way, a good night's
shelter, mature trees. When we're in bed she tries to soften me by hurting
me with the picture of Dianna staring at a deformed person [me]. The cricket
continuously, the surprising intensity of light and sound when a train
came past on the hillside.
-
- 2
-
- In the morning I hear a car, it wakes me, a thin old man frightened
of us. I'm not of him, in charge.
-
- The hill's there in daylight. We talk about how she needed this for
her childhood, pleased. A second man's sympathy. We see them in the breakfast
café. Luke sits apart. They are brilliant with the tape recorder
and I drove well. Beautiful buff, sand, rust, of hills.
-
- The sun came. Through the canyon, through Clearbrook. Uncle George
not knowing how to be. Cool with the cousins, find myself in senior wife
and she in young woman. Grandpa's littleness when I came bending my head
sideways toward him. Oma gave us each a dishtowel.
-
- The difficulty of Sunday traffic and rain, windshield wipers not clearing
the water.
-
- Turning into 6th Avenue. At the moment I was leaving, a beautiful young
woman came out of the house. She stood on the porch watching us leave.
A pain, was it of parting, we hadn't been in love since .... Or something
I knew about.
-
- The garden better, height of leaning sunflowers. Paul's changed age
and solid Luke. Walking with Luke from the laundromat in the dark, slick,
and wet, realizing with joy it was toward our first location [the Powell
Rooms]. How he looked in sweater and rubber boots.
-
- 3
-
- On Monday J demanded to be brought Ezra's brush. Luke had an appointment
with Kit at 10:30 in the park. I showed Paul some writing. He got bored
and went to take pictures of the elevator.
-
- J was in the white jacket lost in the back garden.
- I held off, brought it to the deadlock to leave separated.
-
- Directly to Cheryl's house parking on the shore in front of her building.
On the stairs looking to see whether she still lives there, saying I'll
tell her I'm here and leave. Her thin arm pulls me in, and corridor and
kitchen next to, heart knocks. Can't take off my boots because of smell.
Get to the questions fast. When the phone rings I'm trying to say the middle
one: same old question, whether it's necessary to see it the way other
people do or whether ... "Isn't she dead accurate?" lightly.
-
- Trudy's pale. Politeness knowledge wrestle, sometimes a directed, chance
it in company. They want to know how it is domestically. I keep it off.
"You're not saying it." "No I'm not." "Make it
direct." "Insecurity long enough is security." House/future.
I heard religious but maybe it was from other times.
-
- The way of looking at her as if with her in a tunnel.
-
- -
-
- Hardened from, although in the jeans and white jacket, your worn.
-
- Ezra wants to stay in the car, how will you know your feelings without
her. Is it that you think it's another form of self-injury. Reminding of
what you call the deadlock. You say I must track it. (But you want somebody
else - but you want - but you remind me who doesn't know what you're doing
in it.)
-
- The difficulty she had getting it out. She didn't see love. That it's
such an issue for you makes me not want to track it. You backed off it
and I let you: so you aren't ready.
-
- C reading Bergan who said a woman found out she was made of parts of
other people and things. She could follow her intuition and let the centre
of the universe draw her to its own marvels, or she could go back into
being her name.
-
- "Were you talking to me a few weeks ago?" "Don't say
that it scares me."
-
- Doors going to be opened when I've put my hand up toward the paper.
She's yellow, not well, her hand out quickly to draw me in, fast embrace
without waiting. You're different. There was a fast smile but, corridor,
sits down. I'm scared, large and solid, alright, can keep moving, waiting
for when it slows down and I can reach back to find the quality, looking
carefully. Loose hair grey mixed, look fastens to voice is too fast as
if she is in trouble. "I'm such a baby, trying to grow up, scared
of every day that comes." Giving details, parents, "I finally
told them the story of my life."
-
- On the sofa side by side, nervous, why do you have your knee by me.
So slight a body folded, not magnetizing, keeping light next to me on the
couch.
-
- Telling the vision into space fast, watching to see if it's careful
or careless. Notice the slight entertainments, slight entertainment things
about Luke.
-
- Phone. "Isn't she dead accurate?"
-
- "Are you working?" "Piles nobody has seen." "Are
you studying?"
-
- I wasn't expecting but not surprised, floating on top, listening for
whether I'd say anything to her I didn't know.
- Then T jumping on C's description. C: "You can't stand any kind
of weakness can you." T says she says it's always one way. C says
she says it's a way that feels real. "He was inert." What's inert?
"For a year." Description of the patient who cracked up the psychiatrist.
-
- Telling her parents. "It felt liberated." The 90 year old
grandmother.
-
- "Is Jam in with you." "She's not in with me but she's
here." "In and out like always." "Yes."
- "Is Jam going back up with you?" Shrug, slice fraction of
a glance. "You - ?" Go ahead.
-
- "How have your dreams been." "Only music. At first I
wasn't paying attention very well. Cello." Laugh. "Was it practicing?"
"No it was the real thing. How are yours?"
-
- Last night's looking in garbage and finding:
a suede suitcase, beautiful objects as if an old woman's estate, enameled
plates. I kept finding one after another, they were this size shaped like
seashells, each one as it came different than the last, a completely different
design. One covered with a dark blue flower, others smaller and more colors.
I felt a collection for a different household of objects than I'd had before.
- Whether to trust love, to live with objects.
-
- Jean "the objects I'd got used to seeing around."
-
- C "It feels like it's got to the end of objects so that if I want
something I have to sell something."
- To T: "So you think you don't have to get rid of things to have
other things, now?"
-
- Old woman artist.
- Remembering the pleasure of stocking the Vancouver house.
- Pleasure at Andy's [house] seeing my former objects.
-
- 4
-
- We went to buy shoes and bought the right ones, in Woodwards with many
others to look at. Then in the car.
-
- Then J in her cave refusing. Fury. Then 4th Ave with Luke.
- The 5 dollars and then 3, Luke saying he'd be gone 'til 5.
-
- Wayne looked right but didn't see or listen. Paul was greedy. I ate
and ate and left.
- Luke entertained but failed.
-
- The warrior woman, reading it to hear J's kind, a few words.
-
- Scraping gravel, what's stored from every -
-
- -
-
- She liked the dream but in everything was removed and a little acting.
Jean "on the outside collected but inside in pieces."
-
- At Ronny and Lucy's. A cloisonné plate. I felt or saw the room
I'd have with them.
-
- Carmichael in the other unrecorded dream jumping
at my back singing, excited, talking about the symphony, meaning he was
glad to see me but didn't want to hear.
-
- Show me a motion,
- la la la la la
-
- 6
-
- Sick in the aft.
- At Keefer St [at Daphne's presumably] chaotic. I want someone to know
what it means when I say I'm beginning not to believe the idea of 'life'.
They are false about it. Do I see or is it a splitting away from where
"they are all together."
-
- -
-
- C was at the couch wrapped in a blanket, house ordered, reading a Japanese
play called Giving up our madness.
- As if a forgiving had happened.
- Then I felt my jaw forward and locked in Roy's underbite smile.
-
- With J: working on not exaggerating, not saying 'never', 'the most
in my life', 'the first time in my life'.
-
- Vision: a man in a tweed coat carrying a plastic bag in his arms, I
thought flowers or a baby, ascending C's steps with some young boys. He's
good-looking.
-
- During a night waking on the evening of Monday 3 Sept I heard your
voice say Ellie aloud.
- When I told you about hearing the voice you said it was from another
time.
- I said yes it seemed like that.
-
- Vision and voice and felt recurrence. Felt dimly it could be them.
-
- In bed I saw currents from a person to a person.
- Thinking that's why I'm picturing currents.
- They met in the middle with turbulence [sketch] - it wasn't that -
why can't I remember.
-
- Writing and remembering are connected to each other. I've several times
thought - when writing brought back the vision - no, that was with Paul
- something: that the writing was already connected to it when it happened,
so it would be there with its pair,
- like dream and déjà vu.
- Simultaneity and sequency unified in a general theory.
-
- "... and so when the mystic makes the reconnections of" and
...
-
- When he focused and asked do you think there's anything to be done
in preference to other things?
-
- To have a look, what's he asking, why.
- They agree, it's as if they've said there are people in history and
in places.
-
- Story.
- Joyce: a life isn't a plot.
-
- A sense of old positions brought.
- New heresy. Herzog. Heresy: to begin to disbelieve in the machine.
The stop is technical: this won't work, is on the wrong level.
-
- A sense of making, a raft.
-
- The words mean migration, animals, regular.
-
- Going carefully on,
- watching your progress from outside.
- I joined you in my new thought.
- "You're the other half of my thought."
-
- I'm angry they won't do my work for me,
- except in the places where our historical life goes on.
- A contemporary dimension. The texture of -
-
- Contemporary 'past'. And then?
-
- The Rosicrucians were concerned exclusively
with the study of nature.
-
- 7
-
- Luke comes in from Kit's.
-
- Driving through the streets knowing what to notice and ignore, to make
it easy. At Nellie's a long stop before starting looking for things. We
sometimes arrive in our eyes, try to keep the speaking short and grey.
-
- In the morning reading Capilano Review, Cathy Ford saying how
it is for her, research, why, on Joan of Arc. Both seemed to be real. An
edge, she said, and then I notice it's at the edge.
-
- [Nellie has found me a job building a fence.]
-
- Building's a simple mind. Liking to make the posts, three pieces measured,
cut, fitted, nailed, the open lines and intelligent plan that left allowances
where they're alright and measured from several accurate parts.
-
- Silver wind, rain, looking down at the garden, Diana laughing. J asking
to go see Anna, a slick blinded drive there - not blind, although dazzling.
-
- Herzog. At first thinking it moral to leave, then watching how he softened
to keep the audience.
- Place, some dwarfs speaking well.
-
- Are you ready for a long endurance?
- "We seemed to have found again what attracted us to each other,
an understanding," thrilled.
-
- 8
-
- Luke, Kit and Mark.
-
- Daph phoned early.
- When she came grounded me out of speeded thinking.
- I was watching her humoring me (as Paul won't) by watching me carefully
describe, and being conscientious about the writing I gave her. And then
I could talk about writing but felt myself using her unfairly. Walking,
writing the one word and the sense of events.
- Attention. She hasn't unbalanced. It was alright, I wondered what she
gets from it. It was friendly but not except for one moment's looking -
-
- You. I'm stale, you don't love me.
-
- Lady Chatterly. He's right after all but what about after you open
out?
-
- Kung fu movie in Chinatown with Luke delights us both, the way he seized
a tree for a lance.
-
- 9
-
- Luke goes with Kit and Mark to Co-op Radio. He's taken to lunch.
-
- At Nellie's I can't work, read an OMNI through, raging.
-
- At home alone after the rain, pent, pressure, Mozart Idomeneo,
acute to read. Morning of mag, out of the window with Luke's binoculars,
the round close-up frame, a rapture. Light in corridor, intense love, I
call you at Ronnie and Lucy's wanting to love somebody, you're working
and not available.
- Luke and I eat vegetables with butter.
-
- The girl in a flared coat, her gestures.
- Neighbourhood.
-
- We walk out, find nothing.
- He's angry when I leave him behind, his feet hurt.
-
- -
-
- I'm stretched, yearning, restless. Go down the steps. Luke comes. I
send him back for his sweater and my money. Stand in the alley while he's
in the house looking at it as if it's a strange house.
-
- Kitchen wood, bathroom lace in the afternoon, Mozart, the orange light,
round opera glasses round, pictures of roof, plant, wire, cloud.
- A woman in black with short dark hair, who walked beautifully. A young
girl in flared coat and sandals, her gestures, black hair, watching her
in the round frame of the binocs.
-
- Light through a plant onto the wall, shadow and then intense alive
colour.
- Looking at myself in the mirror. The morning of the magician.
- Familiar ecstasy began when Luke saw the red glider low over the city.
- City. City.
-
- When we walked we came to the housing project playground, in the streetlights
bleached trees. He ran to the climbing frame and swings. I found him beautiful,
all the children, a boy on a bike, a girl on a bike, the way they moved,
Gary and I in Mesa trailer park.
-
- Then Luke when he braked with his feet, came off the swing, ran up
the grass hill. I moved to meet him, beautiful body boy, sweater tied around
your waist. You want suede polish for your shoes.
-
- Looked at bills for Chinese movies. Last night in your nylon jacket
with your mouth open next to me, and others, mothers, all with their mouths
open. The speed of the fight dance, and then men in long hair and skirts,
spring, move in any direction.
-
- On the way home his feet hurt, he stopped. I went on home. He followed,
I listened was he following. He went ahead. I limped home on Hastings.
-
- A plump girl, "You're like a turtle" to the other.
- Hotel picture windows.
- Coming around to Pender, a red light circling across the front of the
building, then the ambulance, then Luke leaning on the corner of the building,
then he sees me and disappears. He's angry and says he'll go away next
week.
-
- The orders: reverie, experience, reflection/writing.
-
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