up north 5 part 1 - 1980 june-july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

[alternative unedited version] June 1980 [Somewhere in here I arrive back at the lake house from treeplanting and Vancouver. My car is in Beaverlodge where I left it in January, and Jam is still at the house. ] [undated journal ] On the highway, afternoon but dark, spray on the asphalt making a cloud around fast moving almost unseeable hurling trucks, the 3 seconds splashed windshield holding onto the aiming of speed, from Beaverlodge to Hythe rain so hurled it was smashed hail driven at 45 degrees. The car smashing ahead into it with a skin of mist on the inside of the glass.   A pale green truck [my parents happen to be where I get off the bus] parked at Connelly's. I drive into a deep hole in a puddle, park, run hobbling in wondering at the strangeness of the hobble. One large and one small face finishing pie and ice cream, glad to see me. I was glad too. Three letters for you, and you talk to me eagerly, you are excited about your mother's coming death, and wildly more like her.   Nightfall from the table. Past the pantry door the upper pane has willows in movement I see I could enlarge, go to. Behind them, between them, orange and pink.   Through the near window to the left, in caragana dots & flowers, shadows, the big grinning face of toothless Demeter in a horned crown. You look from behind my shoulder & see it right away. I take its picture. Moving makes her vanish or a hag.   The sumptuous grass, a pane of luminous grass close and further, blades in their excellent bends. A wild toothless goddess of shining green. - That the goddess force could be eccentric, not elegant.   Of all the photographs only the two nightfall gave me and then some of the later multiple ones.   At a table in a kitchen with a stove, the walls clear. We're at a table suspended in a room, house in that way suspended in fields. The stones were still plain in silvery light at eleven.   The grass's juicy moment, first fireweed, the rapefield yellowing in two days, two candles, yellow swamp flowers. We had a solstice, a bird, or two, cut in circles between roof and trees.   The microscope, two lovely daughters, lost women. We won't be here together next year, turning together differently now as if not afraid of being caught, lessons completing. Small forearms, blue brocaded vest and blue jeans, white cotton t-shirt. I didn't look at her when her hair was long, seeing the texture of my photograph sheets.   If it's the world & persons, all the corrections. If it's just one, 'experience' from here. 12 June 1980 O the angel in your arms this mor-ning / 's gonna be the devil in somebody else's a-arms tonight. 13   Resist: know but don't say. 14 A look. "I got a shock." "Your face me" An intensity around the heart, it's not moving or jumping. Body's alright, it's full of dark shapes. I wanted to launch onto a strong movement, your small body isn't strong enough to want to. Then how does she - ? In reverie and clock-making. She doesn't feel currents, she doesn't dance, how does she - "He wanted to make them, he didn't want to break them."   The inheritance. Genea - what kind, tutor spirit.   A person, seen at a certain distance, usually in a landscape.   The summer and courtyard, place is time, it's then - now - believing it. Holding off. The then of being with, not different than with the planters, struggling in estrangement.   Any love's an eye.   What's the confusion in. The two, it's right, body's fullness of that feeling. Is it wrong, will it keep me away from what I have to find or die (have I), when the arms around in a very close hold, whatever, yes. The moments in between, she: I practiced saying alright you can be here, he, all of you.   Any part of it a story: go in here. Thinking of it, attempting, as a continuous, that entering makes a bulge in - Why: any part. Not why, the quality of experience. And then: who to help? They - I know nothing about the quality of 'their' experience. The miserable. When I am. But starvation, illness, it won't let me go (I've understood!), the tension is given.   Le Guin. Guilt and panic in jovial introductions. 'Marriage'.   HD this early morning, this early morning rosy north dawn, mosquitoes hot under the sleeping bag, the wood room. In the pantry the dawn color directly, I don't forget you hearing my boots. Birds, the hidden ones. Bryher - never used myths, wouldn't speak about marriage. HD taking to helplessness.   The long-handed woman in black.   A rule that anything made should be made as if without a name on it.   The one is a teacher who knows. Making one to know. Why I can't know. Invest-igate. Making the house she'll see Separate it to her and the one who knows. Back to exercises.   The largeness that opens when I think of Christian teaching as made from some mistake, ie about mushrooms.   Killing = total repression.   The glass case 'spiritual mother' but insulates.   or they even have a disfiguration   When he was still in his mother's womb, saw a star. Children - the coming personality. Tree symbol of self. Child - either spirit of child truthfulness or - Shoes represent the standpoint. Tigers and lions.   Hearing qualities of imagined speech.   Genea tutor spirit. The Friend.   Voices who aren't in your interest or from your own circumstance. Speaking from an organization, 'complex'. An emotional/feeling structure.   There are organizations that are 'older,' more animal, 'nature spirits'. Keep up relations to organizations like this. There are also people who can just look inside and observe their dreams in daytime. Dreaming two of anything means it's coming up Takes things out of the water = fisher = saving. Horrible dreams - the unconscious wants a conflict. Always broken up and then rebuilt. Lion strong passion.   The crying flies. Stop, wings sound a wail, silent, rub front legs, move, small jumps, jumps and turns 180 degrees, crazy stagger between the two candles on the floor, runs up nearly to the flame, falls. Does the candlelight confuse their orientation, are they doing 'something' or mad, an awful crying. Rain. Again the round stone. 16 Monday Yesterday morning waking, thinking of labyrinth confusions, heard a voice say "but you don't energize it". 17 Tells eyelids. Kissing - I'm thinking of making it a film, "I want to say something," long tear from her right eye. In Hythe laundromat an alert person in fine clothes comes in and knows me. Mary Davis in a chair. The fine looking couple, is it Horseman. Read what happens as if it's a fairytale. Assume dreams are readable because they are psyche structure. Read what happens as if it's readable like that = it's psyche structure. It looks as though somewhere it was known. The dark with light places (color). Darkroom work white branches in dark. Xerox Cells 18 In a truck not sure which, forward or back, is the emergency brake position. Not able to stop. Products of artistic fantasy attract the anima figure To produce images and thereby catch one's own soul The emotional and feeling substructure of a word or - The silver like feminine A fish has come to the surface with a message The spoken word represents the act of becoming or remaining conscious Voices usually have a hint of whose they are, the real knowing voice, "you don't feel that there is a being in it or behind it." - I then tell the dreamer to notice that there are different people talking, that they cannot be taken only as the voice. A capacity for mediating the form in which he can raise the inner voice from beneath the theatre of the witches An illusion of beauty - the dead as close to absolute truth Any unconscious complex can incarnate through projection Absolutely wrong to cut it off, we have to keep up a relation to it so it can come back. His inner witch seducing him into reviving corpses instead of taking the next step And the clairvoyance of the nature spirit in human Repressed falls into the grip of some dark and archaic father god image in the subconscious Return to the older gods, they'll know better where the treasure is hidden, because they know the place. June 30 full moon Coming into the dark bedroom. above the girl baby, the air shapes eddies of her thinking and communication, fine, subtle. I see it with recognition and confirmation. Two other sleepers with fatter, denser, comma shapes above them.   "In here with me." She was glass, she was sheer to the brilliance.   July 12   The Paris Biennale. To be invited by Paris to something international.   We hover in small talk. She cares who'll be impressed. I want to know, will there be a sculptor I like, can I take Luke. Red silk coat. To use a fame for local movement.   Could I make the plants shine by looking at them. Astral light. What is seen. Paracelsus the more the physical body is active the more is the double stupefied. Magic - science and art of consciously employing invisible powers to make visible effects, 'will', love and imagination.   the sidereal body, through whose organism we may look into Nature in the same way as the sun shines through a glass   the inner nature magic inventrix finds everywhere what is needed plants   Acting married. The house, how sunset light comes through the north stair window. Expecting Paul.   Stood on the table, she pinned up the hem. In her room saw her blue vest in the garden, strip of angled mirror.   A steady rocking, the same movement many times. Being with it wondering whether not being willing to repeat kept us from whatever we know now. When I'm with you there, how is it. A sense of how to move is sometimes ahead of me, I know whether I'm following or not. You are not a person in the daylight way. Pliant. My fingertips and hands work on your smooth and young skin, sometimes to induce my own sensation, othertimes, yours. A sense of having the dance to shape. Impersonate - I understood the theatrics of inviting, flattering. She said it was someone else's skin.   The dark green. Overcast. Corner spruce whose branches make the corner all the way to the ground. Yarrow's white heads float above the ground. Green at different depths, the partly filled layer near the ground loosely woven. Out among it a white bedstead.   A sound with a slight ring, she scraped the bowl.   [Janeen visits] Not a person, not the person, very young. I don't remember I could concentrate deeper and find someone I didn't know from before, out of the vagueness we're both, all, in. What's really there - I've been excited you're coming - "I'm glad to see you" - I've been not knowing what to do, making the kitchen warm, starting to cook - how could it have been - what did I want to hold - sameness - of course I still love you, the line of the cavity under your cheekbone, your fine white yellow hair, breast under green sweater. Do you mind how I look at you. "I remember the day in your trailer," four in the bed not sleeping. Your breast, if I felt it did you feel it too. [She says she likes her letters.] "I don't feel that way about mine, they often seem more false to me as if I were trying to make up a person who'd be more popular than I could be." "I don't know why I didn't bring it, you drew a picture and wondered how it would be if you were a nightclub dancer." "I envy the way she and her friends can be together all the time."   The upper air is still light. The clouds are low, in clumps, grey, brown, on their undersides. Between their brighter edges, the sky is light, pale, blue. The dark tops of spruce, lines, and of small poplars, with flicking circles. Between them was the white new moon at the distance that's still completely sunlit. Below and close, grass green, yellow green grass light.   Then the window was cold on my nose and cheek, and the difficulty of my eyes' focusing.   I am here. One of the pictures I'm repeatedly given is this: I often hear wind arrive. Begin here, or here. Fine-looking nettles between the white rails.   That the scale of significant event is different than daily time; searching carefully in daily time, still makes only a grain of event in many days, but those grains belong together. That's from the sense of work.   July 21   frightened back by the gatekeepers the buried trust leaving the layers behind cosmic guerrillas   in the name of the great first alien Life from the worlds of light multiplication of demonic worlds 'spaces' 'mysteries' spatial realms, demons, persons 'to pass through them' the magic of their sphere, a gravity the inn Who has thrown me into the body-stump? To challenge the gatekeepers, "I have come to know myself and have gathered myself from everywhere." the letter who with his voice had awakened me Having penetrated into terror's empty spaces, placed himself at the head of those who had been stripped by oblivion. Never to accept a gift from Zeus, but to send it back I remembered that my freeborn soul desired its own kind. standing below in the stream of waters His image is kept safe in its place, it grows with his deeds and its form is perfected by his toils. the spark     the seed of light     the point How has it been - from coming home at night on foot without coat or luggage or speaking, angry. Wet grass. "Yr best friend." - Your lamp I don't know how to use. Letters, your life. Miss you is a loneliness in body, looking for you in your room. Why it's so easy to forgive you, you're at home in my country. The house's existence getting complex forgotten times in it. When you leave I'm in a hurry, hard to bear suspension from what, glad we got to sweet bodies from other goodbyes, glad to like how you look walking from house through garden to car. It feels handsome. Send you lovingly, a woman in a dress looks after you. I mistrust my trust, but trusted we'd built something good for you. I don't forget it's a generic to you. The porch and front room, and outside bed. Miss Luke. Saw him, was going to ask him if he wanted to come, it was mother chat, I could be with him without talking. Saw her with a small Chinese child. That you've been here That you still dream of - But is it personal Does it matter This is the kind of talk of her journal and some of our letters when she was here - what's wrong with that - I was with, balancing & feeling in the sense of being with. Esther said dismissable as Sandy wasn't. Phony. "A happy love affair not for always but for three years," said in 1977. "more her usual distant self" A squirrel taking a peanut, sawing forward with rapid little mouth, big eyes, looked like Cheryl. And I said "I desire to be taught about the things that are, and understand their nature. He replied "Hold fast in they mind what thou wishest to learn, and I shall teach thee. With these words he changed his form and suddenly everything opened before me in a gash, and I behold a boundless view, everything become light, serene and joyful. That light is I, Nous, thy god." kosmos limitless, vast harmonious, orderly, The sensible aspect of order is beauty, its inner principle reason. considered a divine entity Therefore the kosmos must also be wise. [My brother Paul visits.] "I bought it in England - no I bought it in Vancouver but it came from England and still had Earl Grey in it - I can't tell where it was made, maybe in one of the colonies - come to think of it you can have it if you want." I tell her, she regrets. "I'm alright" and big brown van . "Good bye" in a stiff voice. "Me too" in panic - run out with the box. He says ironically thank you. I say coquettishly you're welcome. Giving things away in bravado, little compartments, pot. "'I see it in other people's places" a furious raging against one's own integrity and life inability to deal with a conflict I've lost my great-grandmother's ring, and when I found T and C. Left my jacket and forgot the cheque. Sexually ravenous - Luke - dependency - that expresses itself in wanting to tell. a doubt, a countercurrent déjà vu and unconscious fantasy   When she drove away noticing the wholeness of her car.   egoistic, hostile and jealous, sexual 'moments' - It comes onto the road. What is it, shape of beaver but small, fur tail. Marmot. I beep. It won't go, has jumped into a position with its back flattened down, head up watching as if waiting for an attack from above. I turn off the engine. It stays still, fur blown into an opened circle on its side. Wait. Dirt road in front, brilliant light, west wind, dark green and glitter trees. Prairie dog, a rodent face. I can see black longfingered feet. Get out of the car and down on my hands and knees looking. It jumps into a defense posture with its back up and fur swelled out, shows its teeth, ears flat back and the fur on the top of its head flattened, greyer. His hair is lighter at the tips, squirrel color further in. I'm talking, we're looking intently at each other. I see fright and alertness. It's making a stand, hisses, puts its head forward if I move closer, won't run. I back it to the edge of the road, taking it in. Small creature, to have to be so small, pushing through grass, crossing gravel and this extent of hard open road. Looking at its face as a face. Rodent. It came to meet me. I've got very close, now stand up. It reaches its nose forward suddenly to the edge of my pantleg, like involuntary curiosity. I squat again. It's turned almost away. I reach my hand down to its back and touch it, then stroke curiously feeling the warm strong little body under the fur, round full belly. My fingers press into the hollow on the spine just back of the skull, feel back on the spine. You can let your ears up now. Does it like the warm hand (it's never been stroked). Its feet, not five, but four long smooth black toes, curved nails kept high off the ground on deep pads. A refined old oriental person. Crouched with you I feel the car behind and above me like something that might move onto me. Now I stroke with both hands because it's still there, but it looks across the road as if it's seen something, or is it bored. I'll let you go.     Drive forward carefully, looking in the mirror. The sense when I first touched it of being in a miracle, I must be a saint. That is meant to say almost fainting, this can't be happening.   The outer & inner screen & ear. Moving in experience. Insisting the skill to learn is there but learning it inefficiently, snuffing it out unsure.   composing a fixed & varying and by good love were grown all mind love these mixed souls doth mix again we then, who are this new soul, know How to keep the perceiver clear. Communication.   An exemplary, but only thoroughly Want through and it is a form of it   The way seeing, taking images, following instructions   Interaction and therefore love is learning how to be anywhere   Slides - recognizing gladly - some early pictures of love - they're full of love. 'Work' a certain arm of it, that can be used to hide in, and therefore 'past' - [Grotowsky Towards a poor theatre] to construct a score whose notes are tiny elements of contact But if, in close collaboration, we reach the point where the actor, released from daily resistances, profoundly reveals a kind of provocation an accomplishment that suspends     halfmeasure that he should transform himself before the spectator's eyes using only his inner impulses for he had given up everything holy whenever he commits an act of sincerity It must be clearly established that what it is that blocks his intimate associations - lack of decision, chaos of expression, lack of discipline. What prevents him from experiencing the feeling of his own freedom The exercise - if the body doesn't oppose realization of the image     in question exercises investigate determine the animal's centre of vitality gait way to use body to create the possibility of being interested a process of research to destroy body's resistances which images and associations produce an opening of the vocal apparatus Use the voice to build around one a circle of hard or soft air, a larger and smaller changing bell, and a sound through a tunnel wide or narrow use voice to make a hole in a wall to push wrap an object as if an axe, pair of scissors imitate sounds - then speak language like that the voice an arm to reach a certain spot command of reflexes and improv diapason voice's range voice looks for resonators not in a hurry but very bravely no preparation is allowed a prepared gesture that blocks the continuity   He must never listen to himself, this makes introversion of the voice     (then listen to echo) attacking the space around gradually seek for the chosen animal with the body     when you find its right impulse give it voice you must immediately work out the first impulse within yourself even if different what you're doing belongs to your intimate self exercise the preparations, but climax can't be rehearsed or repeated your whole body and your whole mind and all its possible individual most intimate associations The essential thing is that everything must come from and through the body. If you think you must think with the body. better to act, take risks     of course you must think, but with the whole body, logically, with precision and responsibility     by means of actions moment of conflict play or flirtation when something changes automatically that he can do anything, will be understood and accepted to execute the score during rehearsals establish it as organic 'give and take' and if, before performing, he is willing to make this confession, hiding nothing, then each performance will be full must fulfill an authentic act in place of the spectators, extreme yet disciplined sincerity and authenticity and it is this particular cat you now caress. these are associations Contact is not staring, it is to see. The contact is so minute it isn't possible to analyze it. but as a development of these exercises you should seek another voice, your natural one, and through different impulses of your body, open this voice if you want to have a rich psyche start with unfamiliar emotions it will not be possible for you to tense yourself, the shock of sincerity will be too strong perceive is different from understand Try to show the unknown side. You will find someday that your body has started to react totally, it no longer exists. the fact that the work is tiring is necessary recollections of a moment when we were opened kernel of the ethical problem, not to hide what's basic the first time we take a route, radiance of the difficulty     searching studying confronting what I say is not the truth it's a stimulus the hypocrisy and hysteria, that emotion observed isn't emotion those scenes that give the possibility of researching a relation with - to the outside but not for it the secure partner, this special being in front of whom he does everything the limits not of our nature but of our comfort     because creativity isn't comfortable and if he resigns himself not to do this difficult thing and refers himself to things that are truly personal and externalizes these, he would find a very difficult truth     gives the actor the chance to be taken inarticulate confession is none the professional obligations of a community of workers     not behind the back if several moments of not doing, this internal silence begins and it turns his entire nature toward its sources our existence, our organism, our personal and unrepeatable experience entrust ourselves to something we cannot name but in which live eros and charitas if they don't come easily offering himself to the truth an encounter proceeds from fascination, implies a struggle and also something so similar in depth that there is an identity between those taking part in the encounter the series of shocks. confronting himself in the face of simple irrefutable challenges catching sight of own evasions tricks sensing some of the unused being forced to know why do it sense of laboratory persistent study, systematic renewal of ways of observation     and dialectical relation to earlier work the organism's resistance to a psychic process     to get rid of the time lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction     see only visible impulses Troubled about cunt, what it's like when I want to fuck myself. Word too powerful to put in the dictionary, holy, frightening. It drags them into lifelong stupidity, they do it and are lost. The ones who want a bright soul stay away from it. Her bright soul but humiliated body. I'm beginning to want it. I've wanted it before. Would it tie me in a wrong body. Some who do it are caught and some are fine, I refer out to them as if I don't know how to watch it in myself, does it make me ugly. Outside with the round-end broom handle, full moon. Now it's on again. No fantasy stays. Inflamed, why, I don't know. Doing it makes me ordinary, a person. That wasn't so before. It will make me ugly like Sandy. Many aren't ugly though they're caught. It's because I do it stupidly not finely, rubrub it comes, get up do something. Doubt, has it made me lethargic. Coffee, anxious, unreligious, have to be more religious than the Christians to be safe.   Scared, the film, what to do - oh that is moon anxiety. Anxious. Bent forehead. Angire to choke, distress.   The tall dark certain-minded man with long fingers knew what he wanted with her. That and anything written about fucking fascinates. Fastens. Can it be used up. I don't now know how it belongs with death. Ashes, burnt out, used up. Divided, afraid of it, to be used up by it. If I go down as far as I can I'll find fucking and babies. Now I don't risk it. With Joyce, if I go on, I'll find that and then - the point of stop - I've been there, no way through, am I sposed to give up what's possible and wait in case there's a tall dark-haired man with long fingers, him, Dr Macintosh, or Carmichael, or a short bald blond man with repulsive hands. Yes he's the one I can have, little babies I'd be afraid might look like him. Maybe I could dominate him.   Alright, what's the petulance, it's that if I'm sent back to 'men' I'm sent back to Paul, since I can't have any of the beauties, and am I to save him by managing him - he's ugly - he's not intelligent enough - what - because it's what I have that defiance toward, it's what it means, wants me to do? - Or did I make something with him I'm responsible for and don't feel anywhere else, in anyone I left - a path made or found somewhere. the confusion with my brother. Brother, a deformed small person like myself, not the desire image. What's this, he's in my house and more and more lost I think: being in my house, I agreed, but does it hold me - slower. The puzzle of how he came up in dope. I didn't have this sort of conscience when I fucked him to have a friend in Vancouver, to mend me from Roy. Inferiority in him not me.   "What's the worst." That. And then - I'd be where I began, before Maggie, is that it. Roseanne's man. "It doesn't fit." But when it does - Cleverly escaping, and losing the ring - doubt - what's the doubt, is it theirs, I love nature but am unnatural and nature patiently waits in my cunt.   Beginning with how he was with her. I'm doing something they believe is wrong. The division from them and my taught self, in taking sex to do what I want. But you don't doubt. You don't know you doubt, is it because you know you're in a false position from the beginning. But the way you are, it's often not as if from a false position. Now I hardly fuck in dreams. London you. Cautiously love your body. Could make warm strokes the length of what I could reach.   "You were such a sweet little body last night." "And you."   Press you into movement. Briefly sweet and so sweet but incomplete. "My termination is there ahead of me & if I'm the one who fucks happily I won't be what I'm supposed to be." "What is that." "I won't find it if I fuck." "Are you sure." "No."   Reaction, I don't know, there's imprinting, her halting voice and knowledge, that I've learned and can refuse but only with fright of not being myself. Reaction, I won't like her, and it's possible that her envy, the form of her envy, was in stopping me having the deep fuck marriage. Conflict, she wants to be given away, she was early set to find an own way. The sincere cunt. What other sincerity is it like. Suggestible. There's some clear fact to see & orient from. Carmichael. That's what desire is, expensive. Ken Taylor. If you're very strong you make them fine. When it starts with desire. When it starts with knowing it's possible.   The barking dogs you can still. The clear fact that I live in one way and the opposite's there in depth in me. I don't know if it's deep because it's opposite or because it's the time root of my existence, that I'm lost by refusing. If they're not divided, what? I try to give it to you & we don't have babies. I wait & work with it & am true to it & if it's necessary & I'm offered a way I take it carefully. part 2 up north volume 5: 1980 june-november work & days: a lifetime journal project