[alternative unedited version] 20 November 1979 Valhalla While I'm carrying back a pail from the pump, find myself seen from approaching on the drive, by a green pickup, Helmer, who comes to sit in the kitchen. The beginning of the fire hasn't warm'd it yet. We keep going, don't alarm each other, offer little helps. I can look at his eye, it's replaced   Fasting and from reading too. Sort a box, not much old paper left - outer memory. Thinking of Josie and Diana.   Going to walk on the lake think of J dying on the road given back to her family. She imagines my father, dying, saying to her "I'm your daughter."   Lake. Lake filligreed mud and weed, fine worked surface, frozen hard, pale yellow green felt more homogenous since the thaw, underfoot a solid wrinkled fabric. Further up the dirty circle of goose or swan droppings, 2 ducks frozen into the ice all but their lower outline eaten out. I think of J coming and she immediately does but doesn't see us.   Slide some of the way home. Clouds then color reflect on the ice, Ezra an interesting laminated white and blue long one. She's bright. Sings an alien thinking of Paradiso and I love to see her.   21   The stove room - barrel stove - with chests, seats, three rusted pipes.   From the many things the Nijlands left when they moved to their new house, we wanted to gather many lacquered chests, things from the east, a cardboard barrel I fall with, but gently, turning. I see in passing detail, and like almost nothing but a bamboo (cage) desk with small drawers.   Watching a girl negligently and an older woman over-carefully, folding clothes in a laundromat. Silent in the fast. At first we could see the mountain, high and snowy, land slopes down between here and them seemingly from the Beaverlodge road. She hates Grande Prairie, we have showers at the college. Each time I'm in G.P. I see a black-capped Mennonite girl. Are they all so uncomely? They look feeble.   Tool rental warehouse, chainsaw, wire cables, tools of affluence.   22   Wrote the solicitor about Luke [refusing Sara and Roy permission to adopt] and other letters. Discontinued family allowance.   Clear waking in the dark, thoughts about something of imagination. My slow twin grabbed for the meaning, to take it into daily gabble. It was gone, but I remember the voice - even, dry, on a level, short phrases spaced by their lengths or more, information sentences, instruction.   Sleep again & miss the morning. Chainsaw in the blown-down poplars. At the lakeside am able to start it by dropping it down the arm's length.   We are uncomfortable. I find twenty dollars on the dash in Valhalla. See Mary parking next to the car. She turns as if driving is still anxious. I'm glad to say hello by eye through the Co-op window. She's peaceful and friendly.   Listening to Lascia qu'io piango the intense magic feel of that time, the cut of her edges brings me to tears. M can hear how much I want to sing.   [Streisand from from Handel's Rinaldo on Classical Barbra, 1976 Columbia]   -   Sore brain. Don't know how to figure it out. The bible made of scraps in books that are unbelievable in the rest of them. Oh a beautiful vision. Will the sense of setting into the right place - bedlam just starts to sound in the back (room), I silence it. Knowing about this place. It's impossible to know. I'm unable to know. M said "I can't know about motives."   The glass house is created out of whatever's there. Must be first thought into being, anyone has to know the conditions to make it. Does it have to be held in being by conscious - no, unconscious - sense.   Materialization - learn the pattern of green silk duckdown quilt, a better apple. Or the shell could feed you. The intelligent people would be floated and have no material worry. Anyone could learn. The learning would be made profit-proof. There'd be sudden joblessness.   The She'd. Anything that can be remembered, slavery would be a sign of crime and the slave could escape. Everyone would be able to know how to make anything. It wouldn't be in language but in direct sensation. Learn back from the senses. "Things similar long held different." Su geometra.   The world would be the same, sensual, Studied.   To technologize evil out of existence. Would have to know. Balance. Making would be intermade with thought field, errors would (cost) there. Acceleration. Can the mind move fast enough, can it move something else fast enough. Shadow (anti-thing).   Change from air to something slower. (The unconscious that learns to do things language doesn't.) Into making. Where is making made. (In the bits.) In language. Outside.   Only if been to heaven where there's no anxiety, freely curious, "could delight in any level of curiosity and change."   Not wanting to have an ending. Thanatos - to have it finished. Visualize the whole of a process. Killing and restating. (When I want you back.)   Send 'awareness' out to a semisphere and harden the edges. Feel a precise distance from 'centre' and cause an energy shift there.   Acceleration said J: in metamorphosis, by desire and conflict, sang how in Paradiso she corrects his geometry.   Nothing is itself unless it's done right at the infinitesimal. Would have to be known differently than scientific. The first time anything is made it has to be worked very slowly, unless it's right it's impossible, nothing comes. Exchanging recipes would need intimacy, people would have to feel into one another's flavour. A song could be materialized as a surprise. Study by making copies. The jade plant to go on growing, very difficult. What would be the easiest thing, what one knew best or loved most. You're never gone for long.   23   Firewood in the morning. Finishing letters, excited for war. Solid words, thinking superior to the weak one of last year.   Chainsaw at the edge of a clean field. Enter the pile in the windrow, know the balance of everything near. Left foot feels itself, legs apart, arms watching whether it will come crashing down. Press, rock the saw watching whether either side is slightly splitting or falling. Levering up from underneath, daring. The cut round falls past the blade. There's time to look at the next cut while it's in the middle of this one. A bitter taste, poplar.   White scarf, blue teeshirt, want to show Valhalla the working body with sawdust and loose legs.   She sits on a cut round facing west. The light comes from the horizon, from under the cloud ceiling. The shadows are an odd color, turquoise laid onto the color of earth without light. There's the feeling of an edge, a brush wall & then west to infinity, yellow open sea.   Speaking is uncomfortable. 24 She lies about what she was doing with Cherri when I was angry with her.   Fasting, dismay or hurt or what. She said she removed herself when I was rude. We're both mean. I shout that I'll go.   And pack a suitcase with papers to go to Mary's, and there lever the saw through spruce in a windrow. Branches are standing up on a big fallen tree. Animal signs, veldt. Keep working, see not much. When the sun's low, the bush is lit at the top, standing up. Underneath is shadow. There's a line, the upper zone has a few poplars standing above it, it's like another layer of earth's surface.   Mary's house is clean. I resist it. Christian pamphlets. How, in a house I saw into in La Glace, a life is accumulated, plants, curtains, an old man.   On the radio Mavis Gallant in Paris, able to go on writing.   I go home to the better house. This fast has made me shriveled.   At night we wake and talk about dread of the wet black gaping red. Swollen mouth I dodged. Sleep lying back into bliss, dream she manages a factory, has hired seven ordinary men, a nice old man foreman we'll know for long. 25 She calls estrangements. All day bread. Sunday. Happy. We brought the touch stones.   Ardent stories of the progression of possession. A woman gives in to the one she sees will love her best.   Fighting coolly. It doesn't feel good but -   Succeeding at company by taking a victorious position in the old army shirt. A woman says "dismal, don't you think," and I say no I don't think so. A man speechless with the kettle. An old man carries out identity markers, "Noway."   - far far from far from far far from far from far far from far from far far from far from   live sell sink open fuck black under black fright time in parts death near death near death near death near the camp open hole beast hole mud hole open camp explode/explode take me down knock me down let me into the place let me into the place wet shines wet shines   locked out locked out   Why I want to leave you. You won't flow for me. You're murderous to Luke. You want to feed our making to the thesis to please your father, to prove yourself.   curiosity come again oh curiosity come again   no one no body but edge lurch the lurch open the arch the dark black wet and red gape   no one no body but edge lurch the lurch open the arch the dark black wet and red gape 26 Dream of the yellow canyon road, forward and reversing each time more opaque, muddy. There's water on the road, we hear a waterfall on the left, see through the opening into a shaded colonnade where many people, as on a beach, are gathered waiting for the weather to change. Beyond the columns a large amphitheatre slope and, I infer with wonder, the sea.   Waking to talk, snow in wind. Chainsawing with red behind the trees in the west. Driving there, the burls in soft blue-grey cloud. Magpies' elegance.   Cry the beloved country now sold in South Africa. Are there countries and events. American television. What work. J and M on the phone.   -   Chainsaw gas, bad stuff, its smell. It shakes out over the edge of the round ringed hole. Carefully watch the level rising, watch for a shine inside. Three lids screwed on, knowing where each of them is. Turn the saw. Red jelly sawdust around the hole. Pour from the other, cleaner container, chain oil raspberry pink that pours thick. Be careful or it swells over. Screw the stopper down through the jelly oil. Pull the chain around, feeling it.   Knowing the controls, sure of the machine, then the movement by itself. I had looked to be sure of space for the blade. Familiar sounds, I'm not located in it, have gone out to the logs. Ritual carefulnesses easily built: angle of the saw, it has to be a firm set, watch the tip's clearance, check the plane so I don't see down the cut. When it's set on the log, move it until it's sunk down, then toe in with the spurs and lever down. Then it cuts right. When the chain stops, let up.   Nearly all of this came without language, body felt what would work. The way I'm above it is that, being reminded of the procedures, I go out briefly for talk with David Mann on the other side of the bush, a fantasy.   An upper room, Luke and I. The oilman had come in as they went by. Signals from the sliding windows, I was going to lock them. When the snow comes they won't be able to get in, tracks to the back door. A little salesman con man, red shoes with bows. He offered his arms, and gave me a dance I didn't expect.   She? Last night in bed. Saw her path, with gravel. An image to write from.   This morning Jove's face, nose shine on the plane under the eye, a round beard. Poseidon's look. Elias calm, brown, bright and rosy. God of the sea and of horses.   Vampire rabies, a virus the last stages of which makes one alert to bite.   Thinking by an emotional indication, placing something : like an outer side. The hmm of doubt.   What is it that's puffy in her voice reading aloud. Pretentious. Pretendious. As though she swells the inner nose. When she sings it's young, light. 27 Pleasure finding the back fields, and around the edge there's a lane, a survey line. Sawing spruce. She wants to go home right away, cranky. Raw carrots cut into soup.   An Einstein book from Bill Volk.   Fun at Stamms' talking about Jesse's language, and to Michael because he's friendly.   Eat and eat. Make bread pudding. 28 In the frost plants are thicker. [frost pump] [frost fence] [frost hole] [frost reeds] 'Tension' not wanting to see (her).   Tea, eat, eat.   Alone in the house, sit with Technicians of the sacred, notes from when I saw more. Where earlier I could read, blank words.   Hatred growing.   In the evening a hunger to be madder, is it sex. I lie beside her. She's sleeping. I think, it's like Roy, I can't in any way rouse her, only wait. Her so quiet crying doesn't reach me.   Stamp, pound, rage, write primitive.   She's doing dream diagrams. 29 In the southwest a yellow sky with brilliant single evening star.   In bed 'til three. Story of her five years with Anita. C, T, R, Sandy, Diana are standing there waving goodbye. The ripple like a very fine single ripple over a body of water, whose fineness made you come. It made her happy. As soon as we drove off we started to fight.   It began when I had a brick of pure mute sadness after the dream. One twin was easily born and immediately taken away. I'm at the counter in my childhood kitchen wondering how to give birth to the other. I feel it inside, the little head, a thin arm and the right hand. It isn't engaged, is it transverse? Will it be breech or worse? I am bearing down. Put the shit on the ashes heaped full in the firebox. Now its bottom seems unfeelable, it has engaged.   At Grandpa Epp's house, the two young men are planting seeds in the bed, single grains at intervals, putting soil under and on top. I keep you from sitting on it, if you disturb it, the small roots will break off and the plants die.   Two little children, patterns for their playsuits. Grass grown up long and green in their overalls. The woman of the story sobbing.   I wake.   The head and doll-like body of the baby easily felt inside, will it be inside so long it will die. 30 Transparent rings off first touches, she pinched a small tent, moved from the knees, a deep coal. ("Oh that one, it's very good for the beginning and for a second coming" - I knew at the time, it was one you like too.) Then, expecting to be a quaker girl, finding an out of speed, rough shaking, can I press it out of her fast, slow her to the talent I have tonight. It goes. We discuss what we know about the wild shaking, it's not far from willed, because it's so easily stopped. Trust, she says, not being quite whole-hearted. Her elated meeting with the master touch she knows how to use. A hungry breast on her arm begins to send ripples into her. She moves her arm, yawns, didn't know it was there. I take it all back and lie holding the fire yellow ring in my abdomen.   "How are you??" "... I'm a Swedish tea-ring."   When she gets up to change beds, my teeth hurt.   She makes fire because I'm the woodcutter.   Martin's caution when I go to offer the wood. I find what to do. The Nijlands' wonderful room, her blue eyes, white face. I tell her my dream and the sense of their kingdom and then she frightens me with the lord.   J works hard on the Natalie Granger piece, goes to sleep early.   Candle on page appears outside in dark rose or green clouds. Moon blankness.   December 1   The woodcutter moving in her clothes. A brutal machine. Proud of her light walk in clothes.   In the bush deep paths in frozen moss.   She helps but what is this face again. Stein mischief.   The young whooping in buggies on the ice over our field in moonlight.   Sad for a mind.   Father in pink jacket and sunglasses. I'm on the pile and the saw's mine to grab.   Able, so able and deft, and where's something else. Attention. 2 Saw its pink half, it made the horizon, blue indistinct, a moonscape.   Drunk with belligerence, cry because of how distant the real work is. Lessing's new book and chronicle! Her face looking out of Maclean's.   She chooses the moment to be vicious and I flare outside. Stay looking at the arm's shadow across the door until the feeling scents a delusion, and then it leaps in and uses the nastiest voice to wreck, like T's. Scenting an egotism (courtesy), the voice goes on too long. "... save something for my work." "You didn't say when you didn't understand something." "You shouldn't trust a working person." "I didn't want a courtesy, I wanted a truth."   Confused going to light my fire. "I like to make my own fire Jam."   You don't want to feel me, I know you don't want to feel me. 3 Chopping wood before dawn. "You crazy woman."   Holding two stars, the sky lighter. Dead sleep.   In the spruce well unsafely with the chainsaw.   They bursting having to tell about their old parents. We are obedient staying out of the way.   Eating. Dull.   As if the period was an excuse and so forgiven.   5   Warm wind. At night the door open, roar from the poplar screen, the spruce violent.   At dusk sawing through the caragana base to make a west window.   Sunset, in the south a yellow green, in the west red/yellow between the two doors. Another was open to a clear blue, where a violet (white) cloud was in a curled hill above black spruce points.   In bed sleeping with the door open. Moonlight, the window, wind. 6   Light at my head. It's different, snow on blocks of wood.   Revising the letter script for JoAnn, excited to tell her what I thought I'd found, a comic script.   During eating, animosity. She'd been comparing it with what they do, their little black and white lives.   Cardamom custard in jars.   JoAnn and Daphne, her hierarchy, a foothold in the kingdom. The logic is there.   7   Town. It's exciting to be in Beaverlodge. Looking at waitresses, people. At the chainsaw building, an outrage, hurt rebellion not knowing what to do. She solidifies in hatred because I don't understand.   I don't believe what she says but forgive her when we shop. Easily find a right hat.   There's misery in going to town with a man.   Mary in the G.P. Co-op says "Are you finding what you're looking for?" My surprise lands on her coat, "What an interesting coat!" She blushes. Was guest speaker about glory and could read her story, it brought things right back. A pretty dress.   Thick snow, tension.   8   She was sulking. I leave early. Snow fog. Brown on the white road.   To Epps to mend and be with M. He holds his head, his eyes hurt.   Andrew Campbell-Fowler. "He sat there and said god was only giving him a month to live unless he became better, but he had such terrible problems. 'I think of Veronika as my wife'" "We were worried that he didn't come home but we thought he might have spent the night at one of the lakes. He said 'Mother this is no life for me.' On the Devon Road he wanted to help me weed. He'd pull two weeds and then he'd walk way down the field, then he'd come back, he didn't seem to know he'd been gone. I think god just took him home, transplanted him to somewhere he could be happy. Maybe he lost his balance with drugs. He wanted his own family so much." 10 Putting plastic on windows. She was singing upstairs. I thought I could solve all the difficulties and listed them and said I would like to stay here.   11   Looking at the ugly old face, her small head smiling in the back, both speaking ugly.   Bill Volk's letters, his liveliness and search.   The car plowing through soft deep.   Digging her out.   At the store counter, "By morning it'll be just the chimneys sticking out."   She doesn't want to talk, hate.   Write Tony, want to leave for someone with more life.   12   Look at the iced windows, it's cold. The ice has laid a deep image completely new edge to edge, different sorts of plants. It takes a diamond light from the sun.   Cold, I invite her under, sad, I say I'm lonely and need somebody who's interested in more of me. "If my heart removes itself it will never come back." Tears. She says "My heart has removed itself many times but it comes back."   What is it that removes itself and doesn't come back.   I can't answer and know I'm indulging in going away to Jove. I really floated away but when she asked I thought I could tell the sensation of having evaded.   Daylight. How to use it, there's having to go out for wood, picking a box of kindling twigs, chopping enough for a day. Very cold.   Confused bread. Working.   It's been thirty-five, forty, below.   13   Wake and see it isn't sun, snow a movement in the crack above frost, the outside a place I didn't see. Ordering inside, intense occupation with water and wood, fire, things left from yesterday, pans soaking, flour. Cemented her chimney, chopped wood, carried in water, tried to empty frozen slop, washed dishes, washed the floor, looked after two fires, collected twigs, carried wood, carried more water, cooked a meal (read one Chinese story, Fan village), bathed, thought of her ways to make her body right, steaming face, exercises. Thought to write it. Ate. Thought of her in town.   Morning affection, wanting to give presents and never complain. Looked at the list of things to solve, physical. Tried to write two images from then. Lawrence one chapter, Richardson a bit.   Know nothing except the way the effort makes objects important. Washed clothes and put up a line upstairs. Washed dishes again. Carried out two buckets of dirty water. Fed Ezra. 'Working through.' Panic about what to do. Ordered the pantry.   14   Still in bed, thought of frost's round crawl over surfaces being like electron microscopy, sharp, shapely, made of vague -   3rd night you're absent, Chinese stories and your room.   Less work, clean, soup and cookies.   You're alright but will I know when to doubt, picture of two mounties at the door, hospital. Lawrence's frozen Gerald.   At sundown I walked to the road to meet you. There was color again, tender pale blue, yellow, in the sky, rose behind the house with smoke another color, white, white and white.   Tender means a light press into.   Burnt cookies to Ezra.   Shen - a black haired girl goes out into a garden with little Bolt. At the end, near a wall, he throws down dates. A canal they know about but don't get to, where chess is played under willows.   15   A black woman wanting to give birth. I'm to help her, see if her attic will do for us, she's moving.   Red on the frost under heavy covers. My face stings colder than any day yet.   Brilliance, eating cookies behind the fire reading Lawrence.   Sit down to think, wander away in Omni, nitrogen fixing. A motor, a jeep plowing up, more people, is one of them her? A small pale woman.   Work to order the house, unpack many things she's brought.   Luke's in Portugal, it knocked me. The lesbian's husband who brought her is a microbiologist at the Beaverlodge station, studying nitrogen fixing. Her many stories about meeting and struggling, it has been 35, 40 below.   Books from the extension library, including J's.   16   Cold under the blankets.   Mevlevi book, the way the Sufi atmosphere has passages in it beautiful in a way I seem to recognize.   Shams cried to god and fell to the ground. Mevlana dismounted, dropped to his knees, touched the head of Shams, and the two men embraced. They left the questioning students and returned to a retreat cell where they remained for 3 months occupied with the exploration of awakening, they emerged as one being, within each other the grace and presence of the essence of what each was looking for. For the first time each could reveal to another being the secret in his heart. Rumi was like a room filled with love.   Shams saw this and opened the door.   Sema is to fight with oneself, to flutter.   on the night of December 17 in honor of Rumi's day of union with the beloved   The white treeplanter, box 4 Riondel, Dirk Brinkman. His strong baby.   Their new colors in Portugal.   In the evening it's suddenly warmer, the windows clear.   17   Night into the birthdays [Luke's and Jam's], she's spooky and leads me into fright, where I'm telling and balanced, the fright of incoherence (is it hers?). I tell about the scale, not knowing what to magnify. When I tell the story of Rumi and Shabriz she hears what I haven't told and she leaves the bed when my body begins to like her there. Morning hysterics. Irritation, dissention endless. She dreams I've found Peter again, and I have. I'm exhausted, soft-spined, lonely.   Soup and custard. Daylight work. Naipaul cross with India.   Writing Luke, the voice has to try again to find itself. write Jill easily knowing just where to address it.   In bed. Notebook from the dope year. Speculation, and when we spoke to each other in hope and fear.   18   Waking in the dark, lonely, go to lie with her. It's not right, but the room's warm. My lamp. The thoughts of another time, erasing, writing into one line notebook. Light, dawn, the snow in footprints colored shadows. Tried for filming smoke past trees, spruce tips, poplars in glitter. Then the wind direction changed. (At nightfall straight north.) [frost tree 2]   a confident traveler   so you stand amid a constant vital commotion   Drinking milk coffee. When she gets up I hold a jeering distance. Seeing her stiffness and loneliness, I feel Roy's vindictive distance. Her seal's arms and drooping back, attracting haunch.   In bed, seeing brown and exact shadows of water on the windowpane, with a big sun circle showing full of circulations. Bluer running clouds in the rectangle hit the corner and go on along the next wall. Lying in the sun's yellow heat, was in a time I was open sunlight: when?   Sorting a journal from before Luke and J. Spring. Seth.   21   Solstice, fury.   From not speaking, start to speak, yell. Tension so I can't work.   At La Glace School it is the day of the Christmas party. Classrooms with presents on the desks. The kindness and confidence in which the kids come into the library.   There seems no reason to tell her anything.   The Peters' boy plows the yard. Fury.   Up late reading LM Montgomery's diary. The misery of marriage, daughterhood, Emily written during that time. Free thought, reading astronomy. She died early, aged between 33 and 36. Grew stout in duty. Reading her I felt the lock of duties. She wrote anything to sell, wanted to be a great, was massively popular.   [triangle] She's jerky.   22   It turns in the evening.   From dreams, noted.   "If you have the time, and the inclination." The confidence of clear superiority. He was always ugly, an abcessed front tooth. "Never had the opportunity." Looking so shifty, his language getting smarter as he spoke.   Lascivious images.   Ashen Mardy (from Hythe), photographs of naked celebration.   She's lonely.   The Bodo story made friends. A cold night together.   23   Needing to tell about my student. Waking together, bodies for warmth. She showed a grieved face. We've made it impossible for us ever to make love.   The black rose from the middle and then the beginning. She bathes. I come out to love the slippery body in clean underwear. Tell about Nellie, delight, and Martha comes back. This morning the story of traveling with Luke, nobody saw.   "I hide in books." "I've been observing." "No, it's because I sometimes can't bear to be myself, it is too much."   You aren't visible, and then you are.   "She's clear."   Cathay.   Go to bed separately, am thinking when she calls, nearly in sleep. When body fattens out I doubtfully go along.   24   Under disorder pulling up covers, the rosy face with real eyes & such a smile, talking, rapture & lasciviousness, as if holding something in itself, holding on; open as if to the air of the room; and then later the extraordinary story of how that vision came, she said an indirection, I said I hold it right in front of me; she said you don't know what I mean.   Turkey / India. Both allowing. Her mother and father, Hong Kong, burglars. "Listening to you I'm conscious of a caution about ---."   Has it been the natural Christmas today, in bed until sunset then feasting on fried rice with sausages. "Let's not do any cooking work today!" Walking under stars, crunch, moon seeming to be visibly filling, crossing the lake to it, kicked snow singing on the crust.   -   Must: state of dangerous sexual frenzy esp of male elephants.   my heart heeled half-seas over for a moment   a waxlight floating in a saucer   "produced or patterned"   The way she puts shrunk hands on short arms, into her front pockets, like attaching them to something with power.   It is the hand itself which has slipped me through the barriers into the company of the real ones.   [Durrell Clea]   Thinking of the poor little person whose designs I won't allow. Remembering my mother's face   I'm with Bruce in the bedroom rolling and hugging telling him "I've understood something about you," that he's for men. In the bathroom adjacent my mother in her coat. She's speaking to him. I'm rolling up my green silk pyjamas, telling him I've had many friends who've taught me about railways. I think she's embarrassed, come out to make a warm introduction. She says "I'm very pleased to meet you" so absently I say "Mother what's wrong?" She's frozen, shakes her head, distrait, "I won't say." "Is someone hurt, is it Luke?" Fear, her scatteredness is complete. The waking thought - fear woke me, but the thought was calm - is that she's the little one, 'ego', whose speech I stop.   Grass. Dry subsoil and seasonal moisture in upper layers, the original grassland.   It is the destiny of most animals to be eaten.   Nothing is really consumed in nature, only borrowed.   Driving toward separation, as if complaints are the formalities. Contraction, I must be alone. We'd have been alright not forcing it, to force it is the way of hardening away. What you've never let me have, what you'll never loosen to. The way I'm getting uglier, thickening and farting in the dark kitchen, morose, refusing with people met, throwing glimpses outside as to something I don't believe is there. When I speak to you I wish I didn't have to hear the reply, no comprehension, duh. Or the stiff child hopeless pretending. My always the same stink. We don't have to live together. The rhythm of undutiful impulse, child could be sent away. This one only closed out, meanness, guilt. Sexual restlessness you'll never quiet. You won't believe what I know unless we go through this, and then it'll be too late for the pleasure of seeing you come up the steps, looking at your face balancing on thrill.   To turn it, only move out of. What is no good with you, working at chores, how could that be, pleased how quick and smart. This is howcome you don't know the principles, then doubting the use of any of your vision. All this time you held onto important information. I don't even like the feel of the word in your mouth. "Fat monks, infernal, I thought it would be that for you too." Trying to figure out what a person is made of. Being afraid to lose soul, taking the form of being afraid of the heavy bodies of middle-aged parents.   Writing within the hologram already formed.   A sense of looking to understand somewhere in the elements, when the confident tightrope dancers just work on off the end of accomplished range.   When she listened about Turkey, I said it would have been rape but wasn't, I made a stagy distance. Novelistic? I said yes but it wasn't, it was a movement in the situation to say it wasn't my idea, though practically it must have been. The Kurdish man and the conventions of face; they wrote down their names.   25   Thought of vowing only a book a week.   -   Not long after I got out of the truck, I met the Turkish boy who'd studied in America and spoke American. He would have spoken to me. I was wanting to know how to find a hotel, or I had hotel addresses to find. Did he take me there? We were walking and he met some others I thought were his friends, a tall hawknosed man with eyes held to look fierce, some others I don't remember.   I must have gone to his house for supper. The others came too, brought food and wine. There was a long table. I sat near the door into the hall, where there was a little bathroom and a kitchen. A bedroom door at the end of the corridor. Others could speak a few words of English. I ate and drank probably quite a lot. They sang. It was loud. I enjoyed the rowdiness, likely, although none of them were interesting. They told me what they were students in. I think for the fatter one it was law.   I decided to go to bed early, would sleep in my sleeping bag on the hall floor. Had a shower, washed my jeans, hung them in the bathroom on a hanger. Got into bed in a sweater and my bikini pants. Was dim and unsteady with drink. They were still noisy in the dining room but the door was shut.   When I was close to sleep the little American came and whispered that I had better come into his room and pretend to be fucking with him, else the rest of them would come and have me. I went into the bedroom. It was awkward that my jeans were wet. I had a dress but didn't put it on. Took my sleeping bag to his bed and hoped it would work. Asked if I could go out the window. He said no there were only more men out there. He seemed to be feeling responsible for me but afraid of the others. There were five, I think, all bigger than he. I didn't know what he'd said to them but he probably persuaded weakly.   We were in the dark lying together. They were visible as outlines through the glass in the door, turning the knob. He was afraid of them, went out, came back, said I would have to let them. I had calculated whether I'd be likely to be pregnant, I think I was bleeding, I know I felt safe. Then it was probably a sense of getting through something, or allowing something, forbidden, maybe a necessary price for my freedom to travel as I wanted. I knew it wasn't worth fighting. It was true a ruckus would bring more men probably more dangerous than these.   I had been stupid to wash my jeans and to drink carelessly, but now, only find a posture that makes sure it does me no harm. Contempt and distance. Don't know who came in first. I was on a bed. I don't understand the space exactly. The bed ran along the right wall, had its foot toward the door into the hall where there was light from the dining room. Did he take his pants off before he got into the room? The sight of his penis in the dim light. Big. I held back the curtain and looked away from him. He begged me to be with him. I didn't speak. It was something I thought he should do. I held onto my plan. He was likeable.   There was someone else at the door. I only remember the Kurd, second? Maybe. I said "You're an animal," because he was such a bandit. "I, am an ani-mal?" pulls his arm back pretending to be about to hit me. I face him out, say it again. Satisfactory. When they've all been in, an impression of similar bodies sitting at my knees. I remember feeling nothing sexual, they didn't touch my breasts. The Kurd came back, I think I said no.   I must have put on my dress and come out into the dining room where they were. I thought, should I take them to the police? Asked them to write their names on a paper. They passed it around and wrote their names.   I think it was before that, just when I came into the light - I came out feeling I must save my face by a violence - I took the water pitcher from the table and poured the water on the floor. I think I was looking at the American Turk.   The others went home. It was dawn. I told him I must dry my jeans. He hung them by the heater, but it was feeble warmth. He came, said, "Ellie, since all the others have, won't you let me?" I said no angrily. It seemed to be his fault.   My jeans wouldn't dry. I went out awkwardly carrying the pack, in my dress, that slid up and showed my ugly leg. Limped some distance and found a hotel.   The desk clerk looked through my keyhole. Later I saw a man in a blooming cherry tree looking into the window. Men harassed me in the post office and on the street. I walked around the university and found the paperback Steppenwolf with a Klee cover. Must have underlined what he said about going through degradation.   The whining men on the street made me shout. Otherwise I enjoyed looking at Istanbul. Bought cucumber soaked in salted water on the street. Changed my money for a good price on the black market and could stay three or four days. Saw the blond American with thick legs who'd been in the hostel in Athens, walking with two American boys.   I was alone the whole time I was there. One morning went to the Santa Sophia, which had been in my medieval art course. It was ugly but from its yard I saw a mosque I went to sit in, the Blue Mosque, incomprehensible but lovely. At the docks the houses with wood shutters.   I went on through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France. Truck drivers and other travelers often fed me. I slept outside or in different sorts of shelter, or was invited into houses. I was angry when men were idiotic but knew how to save my skin. What worried me about the rape, as I called it, was that it seemed something I couldn't tell. Jean-Jacques saying of someone, she's the kind of girl who wouldn't mind. After a while I let Bill read about it in my journal. He wasn't shocked and it seemed I could think of it differently.   26   Making the fire alone, wanting to work, alone, letters. The book. Drift. At first thoughts to take out of it. She comes back a quicker body. I'm jealous she'll fly? She wants me to join the company and I do, seeing times that pointed to it. "I think I've just added a stroke to the future."   Hair up. Chinook.   In the book Mary's underlines and her thinking about me, and I think of her and why I hate him like a parent whose faults could get me.   "The whole world." Reading deformity.   Tarot.   27   Mailed to Luke, J-V. Josie's letter.   Dancing at Bernice's.   Love the slight friend.   At night goes out.   28   Sanding the table.   Clear the room. She protests.   29   Day given to fighting.   I cry in helplessness about everything she thinks is wrong.   Tell her I won't supply her prurience about men any more.   Sad for Luke and what-to-do.   Find Duff hopefully.   -   Figuring. Is knowing something that belongs behind. Oh little Percy you're not my type. What do you think, I should be a wife who lets you know it's yours, you can have it when you want it, you paid for it. Look after his ego, he'll be a better husband in the security of it, wives and mothers gritting their teeth, it's not the right time, I can't follow your movement, I'm not ready, I wanted just to lie at your neck. The peace will be spoiled, it's spoiled, you want to be mad at me, you're making a fool of me, men are like children, men have different needs, women have to ease them, they get very tense, it relieves them, they have such difficulties in the world, it relaxes them.   Women's bodies are delicately triggered, a good man knows how to relax a woman, you don't make sudden movements, you gentle her into a trance so her body goes dark and she goes down into it. You just stroke her, warm strokes not ticklish, slightly, on the flank or ribs, head, slowly, so the connection can build and you can both sense it making, until the time when either her breasts or her mouth are dying for you, and from there she begins to sense what's coming and begins to be ready to fall; and you don't go near her until then. Not long at the tease, and then it's rocking slow but solid, leave time for memory to finish the stroke. She has to be free to be completely still if she wants. When it goes right you're making in her an intense sense of love and gratitude that you've been able to lead her by the movements that know her timing, to where you both want to be.   Often I don't desire you because you don't show that you're there. Othertimes I desire you in the oblique way of not being free to feel what would ask for a first movement, by looking at your body interested, holding the sight of it. It has never been possible to see you, touch you a little, build you toward abandoning your outerness and taking me in with you, as it is possible for you with me. Is it that we're missing half the times?   "Somebody who presented herself the way you did, a trivial pursuit that's all, it's a trivial pursuit and has to do with my early days, of having to listen to a lot of girls and not getting anything from them." He doesn't see what life and urgency there is in girl's talk, and so to listen to it isn't friendship it's the chore that might open the way.   30   Private rooms.   Betty Jo but I'm not courteous.   Drink three quarters of a bottle of wine and get rid of calendar papers, and figure out times of moon phases. - in a working net closest to both night and day try for the road across the fields downwater looking for a place to sleep the goddess and members of the expedition diaphanous earth register of north-facing doors afraid that I'm being too much myself mistress of the beasts coming out of the city to where the road becomes a dirt road, goes on over the bridge Ducks' wings, they're taking off, different flight postures, the head reaches, legs hang, wings hold and press. fields and currents snow water air   100' at various speeds, natural is in there undistinguished. fast - slow accommodate length not the same, it has to fluctuate fade out accelerated, a vision become apparent note of length of threshold white/black   like single frame fade-overs (enrich) film because light seems to come through back-projection? Money for Luke, teeth, J, bills Luke's well being generosity extracting an ideal   the creation the snow run the audience the twilight bushes perceiving with a good machine the intimate form of what's being stated she offered her voice, making soft sounds, mostly vowels I felt myself immersed in love in a lovely flow of language draw atoms and molecules from the air to form your image it is the body of your experience the innocence of all feelings, for each of them will lead you back to the reality of love hold equally the vision of ideal self, and deviations from it not wanting to be right because then he will too she, not wanting to love the body, if I see it I'll be envious hermit gardener and orchardman saint warrior and artist shame of the wrong place I thought of the soul as resembling a diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms ... above, below, at the side, in the centre Noticed I had been trying to get her to speak and then using her language to speak back. 31 Slides of paintings. I'm near the back of the room. They're luminous soft colors. It's Kiyooka's class, Jake Jensen's paintings (didn't he seem an artist when he married a pretty woman). First school dream that's been art school, the paintings I think are made to follow each other around the walls like windows made by headlights. At the corner an arm reaches out of one painting across another.   A square in rose or white. The instructor is saying it's a flower. Delight, it's a paeony, the one petal tight bound across the centre. Kiyooka doesn't know. I've understood how to see the paintings, lighted parts, something can be seen by emerging it.   When I walk around closer to the paintings I see very worked, detailed, even relief edges in the image and wonder if the submersion came from poor eyes and distance.   Wanting to cut my hair back, the awful heavy look of my hair and clothes. Want clothes I like. Haunted by J looking at me [as] ugly. The war's between that and the sense it's going back to glamour. Want things I like. It's the picture of a saint who has given up appearance, but I still have to be appearing and uncomfortable, I'm not looking like myself. Alright I will - it's for some courage - dress.   Janeen the finer blond grain. I love her. She's studying a philosophy in some other country with her husband. This visit's near a school, she and her sister at a table. I'm on the straw pretending to do something else, actually holding my panty aside and peeing. See them at the table, across from each other, smirking, I realize there's been no straw under me, my pee has visibly run down while I was pretending above it.   Waking think of my shame when I love, her way of giving hers. I left her, to try for the road across the fields, thinking about why I'm a cowering half person again, whom no one would listen to. - The order of a service, parts where you're woken, or work, roused. They started with welcome. song prayer meeting song announcements song sermon song benediction O! Anfang ohne ende - grassland subsoil x-rays? excavate rock archeology of the present   the salty nature around roots microscope diatomaceous earth smell keep movement over underspeech what's learned and then under   100' or multiples taking the lunar soils apart slides tryout 4 or 5 3 exposures dark, white stone marking centre for reexperience like tunneling, gets darker night and earth a star fading of stones coming of stars   local plants plants in various lights made as a catalogue (names) but also becoming catalog of lights winds terrain etc people giving local names [sketch]   When I come out of the tent in the morning the strawberry leaves shine at me. Is my vision changing its spectrum again. Noises coming near, attention opens to them. Attention opens. Everything is clear.   a sun space, a focus like a living hearth   forces working into the gravitational field   clump leaf sounds at different magnification wind is an undersound take it apart   In Holland Park standing under the tree looking up at the flattening rise and then the lifting fall of the big leaves on thin stems following a branch riding a wind, wrists of dancers.   narrow end of a wind   -   cloud denses   -   windlaid. aeolian in it is wind, shapes other eddies   a counterspatial field Gegenraum   -   treading the void   We move in all dimensions and whatever course we take, the mighty waters out of reverence for our virtue change shape accordingly.   a realm in which to move about freely in thought   Struggling in pain, dissolving every thought knowing its frame to be wrong, finding oneself without language   The fearful void discovered in this way is itself the inanimate and untroubled beauty of matter.   -   a dream of the broken room   At the hotel I was moved from one room to another until I was at the end of the corridor near the sea. There was a sink overflowing but the water went across the floor into the meadow. The last rooms had only a few, or no, walls.   a very brief segment where images behind the writing obscurely do, or not, what the words of a fast reader are telling make the two in bed, hunger as an ache, leaning toward one another and coming together with a tiny resolution like a click a sudden movement like a resistance passed through slow and even and then the sudden finish / / / / each full fire and the last spread   picture erotic light   the study minute the song or weaving     volume 4 up north volume 3: 1979 october-december work & days: a lifetime journal project