| up north 6 part 3 - 1981 february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
February 1981 In a lower room a man is the sail. I stretch his arm out to get more surface. Go up to see if someone's steering. Is it open water. There is a view. Is Zoe the girl. And her mother. Tall view of shores with trees. We're coming to a structure that cuts off the arm of water, leaves a gate. It is a small pretty series of arches like a cloister wall [sketch]. Inside with the dog see cases like sweated aquariums with tropical fruits. Most are green. Limes. The dog runs ahead. Attracts someone. We duck down. A man from the right left. Meeting a man and a girl from the left. Wrote and felt the opposite of what I saw. Earlier it was escape adventure with Judy and Paul? Yesterday morning the man. I didn't need a passport for the boat. Leaning against him. He said By tomorrow you'll be very naked. I understood sexually. He said I don't want you touching yourself either. I said I would if it were necessary and that I'd decide wisely. - I heard people speaking - when I'd heard again - intelligently to other people. The aristocracy when they wanted new talent knew to ask certain cultivated bourgeois couples. The Kozinskis had brought me to a reception, I was going to have my manners corrected - my crude ways - and be adopted into the high society for its use. I'd been bewildered, not known what I was there for, and in the dream I thought, I'd gone home in the lonely way I do.
It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception, and this perception is sometimes at a distance, as well as upon the touch. a kind of body thinking some declare that elephants and other beasts live in their bodies contained in his limbs all animals, and they were separated from him by cruel sacrifices open the hidden heart in wars of love
agriculture marriage and fertility Let us know that the true meaning of scripture is the natural and obvious meaning, and let us embrace and abide by it resolutely. The Kingdom is very close; passing minutes do not bring it closer. The universe becomes my body. only when a clear sky looks down through broken ceilings Take nothing for your journey; travel light inflection see language as lace in the empty air accept loss forever - difference between their mess and the lovely feeling they have in making it to win this battle would mean to seduce the world to madness the battle over communicating the private vision denial of the difference between clean and dirty, order and disorder
We envy their power of keeping a blissful mind
Composition ways of being together except the crimson brown of the saltmarsh plants the problem that was trying to draw attention to itself watching the remembered color change There was some unknown fear to be met in this matter of color. not born knowing the difference between thoughts and things that the inside world might be a world of the dead that spreading into the other would mean taking on the suffering [I think Marion Milner On not being able to paint] - a change in her face by these moments I was able to mend responsibility for illusion Choosing to make the 'artist' in one the coin of exchange. Then either paying in communicability or the extreme reaction of those left out. Has to be an externalization of the unique body, otherwise it has no life. There is no other source for its life. When not distinguishing me from not me, there is the vulnerability. - E.G.R. Taylor 1956 Haven finding art: a history of navigation from Odysseus to Capt Hollis and Carter In the history of invention - navigation - I'm feeling for the parallel without knowing, except as it was in drugs, what I want to know is how to navigate. If it's the soul to be conveyed, then it's a lifetime sequence - how to think of lifetime - the way there's history and not, stories with unknown reliability - the other sense of being here without - if I'm getting to where I see that it isn't thinking, where thoughts cancel, then I'm focusing - is it. What was I feeling in navigation history. They had first to think of directions as winds. The imaginary lines. "He was thoughtful." See the place I studied in. Ask what directions are. Is it metaphor, ie nothing, to think there's a movement to learn for courage of bateau ivre. Henry the Navigator gathered students, did he know what to look for, they went to live on the far edge, thought there's something out there. For soul it would be something about death. Outer space. Is space outside identity. I know I was her and no longer am. If it's a boat that has to be conveyed - (Laing's senile poems) then it's for caution wisdom - if it's a lifetime to try, then it's gather what's known and enter the Atlantic, home doesn't matter. Do I know - child's vow, not to be anxious - if I am the child I was given that's really not the Atlantic, it is home - if it can go into the Atlantic it's always home, or, what any ordinary person does is sail out. I've been sucking up teachings, experience extension, that I now want to leave out. Is there any adventure. The way I've been building a sense of correspondences, and the reading confirmations that make me uneasy, what has been built. What directions are - dream Learning geometry the imagined lines
Persephone Artemis and Athena, triad of persons Zeus in the form of a snake seduces her, his own daughter. This realm is indicated by the snake. The resistance of the material must be scrupulously respected. The implications of the existing material must be examined and tested over and over again.
Feeling March, April, May in Greece
If Greece is an angle of light Poppies sacred to Demeter at Sounion
bridge jests and then they drink Artemis Propylaia guardian of the gate cakes, sprouts and ears of grain bundles of myrtle, poppy capsules laid out on leaves The holy night had already begun when they reached the dancing ground. In radiant color she is sitting on the rock. This did we celebrate in our true and perfect selves. allowed to see perfect and simple, still and happy phantoms that Persephone was looked upon as the goddess of fire cries from men's mouths and cries of light to which the passive state leads: ellampsis, flaring up in the presence of the crowd, lights are put out and they the searching god searched for her vanished daughter as though she were the lost half of herself and found her at last in the underworld in the last third of the lunar month the remote grain-growing regions burial sites were sown with grain making Kore's mother laugh Thesmophoria - October? Women ate pomegranates Mythologia a spontaneous spiritual activity related to poetry and music. A kind of music made with images and their variations. Kernos central bowl with cups attached, for substances sage, white poppyseed, grains of wheat and barley, peas, vetches, okra seeds, lentils, beans, rice, oats, dried fruit, honey, oil, wine, milk, egg, wool Sacred cakes of different shapes and meanings, balls of salt, pomegranates, poppies, fig branches, a serpent, the thrysos = The foods of earth acquired emotive and symbolic values and were patterned with connotations that had ramifications into the structures of civilized social life and its accord with metaphysical realities. The sacred nature of the scene is indicated by the simultaneous shining of both sun and moon. [the night at Rumsey Wheel, August 1992] [June 1977]
Dionysus in relation to hallucinogenic plants - bull Maenads consorting with the adult god, sometimes crowned with opium capsules. Psychologically every marriage was a death.
The harvest is the child conceived in the other world. Bull and mushroom Refusing marriage left them with the alternative of war The air moved over the writing of the sentence, shadows were flowing across the page at the speed of ripples in water. Thesmophoria was October? All Hallowe'en Adonaia mid-July, Lammas 1st Aug Lenaea festival of Artemis, lady of the wild things At winter solstice? January they say Dionysos Mysteries mid-September, Michaelmas Haloia a winter festival for women held in honor of Demeter, Persephone, Kore, Dionysos - wine obscene speeches sexual objects Anthesteria - Feb feast of the flowers, god Dionysos
C Kerenyi 1967 Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter Pantheon Books Wasson 1978 The road to Eleusis Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Marcel Detienne 1977 The gardens of Adonis : spices
in Greek mythology Humanities Press
-
J-V is in our bed. She's on my side. I say I don't think I can make love to her. She climbs over to lie between us, says she likes to be with two. The indent of her back is pretty and like J's. Both of us stroking her find hot lumps all the length of her body. We think they're cancer. She says they've come recently. I think she'll die. (How thin she was.) Twinges in breast and armpit. My upper palate detached. I take it out, it's like the rib bones of a roast chicken. The ribs come apart. It has disintegrated and can never be put back. Dissolution. I've been working as a dishwasher but quit. I go back and find the job has dropped in pay, to 4 from 7, and that it isn't available. I left just at the end of the holidays. In a wrecked house. It's been so for a long time. a broken toothed dusty organ. I play it. Interesting music not quite related to the keys I press. Woke thinking my father (like a clothespin soldier) is the Resistor. Is this (thought's) figures. -
What was the moment like, that took them. Doubtful or complacent. Feeling the right position. meniscus - Next night. At a camp in high mountains - high, that is, round, short green rocks, sense that we're going into further mountains to work. Paul, Judy. I'm stringing extension cord through three lengthwise cabins. The last is Paul's. I'll have to bore through wood. Go around see many extensions already coming off (one) cord. Looking for food under one of the cabins, young men's supplies, my blue plaid shirt, large sound apples, delicious. Soggy cakes or? I don't know what they are. Want something to eat, most are too flimsy, don't know if they're rotten. It's quite dark. How when we're lying together Atomic distances. That is like going through the place where it coheres, into the intermolecular.
The way I used to be when I had taken everything as far as I could but I wondered if it had been a mistake to do it with drugs because then I would have to doubt forever what I had found. Anguish of the solar plex. What's the anguish. A brightness. withdraws that thought which is nearest to speech, or from which he speaks, towards his inner thought, and abides in that. When therefore the man now a spirit is in this state he is in himself and in his very life, for to think freely from his own affection is the very life of one and is himself. When you see what is lacking in another, you concentrate on forming it in yourself and then pass it on. The companions accept the marvels of their gathering simply and gladly and without fear. To know you I have to find in myself very exactly the one who knows you. if you think that nothing else you do satisfies your conscience unless this secret little love pressing on the cloud of unknowing is present Imagination now shows physical images of inward things, and leads to invention and error Sensuality, to look after body, now is inaccurate -
an enveloping space with an inner point Spaces of this kind come into being and pass away again with the life cycles of living creatures. A strong wind means a boundary between Arctic and Pacific. Its excellence is in feeling the quality of any time. It has a certain duty to stones and that is to read them, the marks turned toward the sky and the marks in its fibrous nest.
- It's Tuesday, February. What's been questioning. The answer I got now was: closest attention. As when the question was what's wrong, is something wrong. In this sense of balancing what am I missing - her. A long time without bright fire noticing. No it's different. The two nights in the right quiet. It is complacent. Is it. Is there such a question. About show. Writing and photographs. I thought today, a film about writing and photographs.
her finest attention When I had told her the balance and the suspicion that it can balance because I'm not very sensitive my lower belly had come into fire. She said hers was cold and swirling. "It could be called cold but it's quite still and as if radiating in its dish in the abdomen." Why are you burning my left side. "You'll have to go to your own bed now, Miss." Telling her the platform seeing it, the figure from the back. It's a black robe. Looking at the head could see it was [sketch] nothing but a shape. Closer, looking, a sense of daring myself, or was it there, before the head turned and showed a dark man's face leering. I thought Satan and cut him off. We felt spooky but it was easy to steady it.
The fine steady glow. - very slow paper ghost of horse and cart All that was walking or moving did not appear in the design.
Glen Wade 1976 Acoustic imaging: cameras, microscopes, phased arrays and holographic systems Springer tenemos sacred precinct silver thread what is beautiful about these: The Pygmies believe the rainbow is god's communication with them. When a rainbow appears they immediately take up their bows and shoot at it. When a child is being born among them many people will undo all the bolts, locks and latches in their homes. leaves for the outer edge of the wheel where the movement is faster maimed beings witches that take the form of old women, to test Clothed in flower tunics and silver stars they carry a gold staff and wear green stockings. They watch over animals and have underground palaces full of jewels and other treasure. Bird. Two birds, inseparable companions, inhabit the same tree; the first eats of the fruit of the tree, the second regards it but does not eat. When they are joined inseparably, then the one is indistinguishable from the other. birds, amorous yearnings cognate with arrows and breezes
swarms of insects dissolution teeth - the fortress walls of the inner one Broadly speaking, the book is related to the symbolism of weaving. bridge - between what can be perceived and what can't. butterfly - in China the secondary meanings of conjugal bliss and joy square canopy alludes to earth Buddhist good luck One dreams of a child when some great spiritual change is going to take place in favorable circumstances. The wise child Biel same on mythic cloud - with mist intermediate between formal and nonformal Bachelard it's a symbolic messenger
flocks like constellations Lameness usually symbolizes some defect of the spirit. ice a stiff division between conscious and non-conscious image - degraded (superior) form of knowing the unknown - making something unknowable stories about islands, a story is an island
landscape Disappointment in love is the root of all the evil in the world. Intuition: prophetic constructive and wondrous, and yet at the same time is infirm and malign. mist of fire previous to earth The net of heaven is wide-meshed. A Saturnalia became a god and then killed. being able to stand the tension of a secret Spinning like singing
Friday Feb 13 At studio: profile showing overbearing: "The one thing I pushed her about was her music." Saturday Waking flat near the floor. Anguish talks quietly about what's wrong. 'Not knowing.'
Before assenting further, she will know where she is and among what powers and conditions. She can almost sense directly the interlocking webworks of field forces, the lawfulness of every accidental configuration. All this she understands as the expression of subatomic transformations and events. The ultimate minute causalities are hers too, when she wills to look. Here the beloved naked to her view Floats out to lose itself in the justice of the play of suns and atoms
I have done nothing, what can be wrong with that. Yet I am somehow incorrect. a lovely time then, a time of beauty, comedy and surprise, high up in the winds of Tyree a concentrated image to drain another's pain so the damage is undone The way the story is from the hall of mirrors Trying to form a crude receptor node a beautiful vision of streaming wind or liquid, vast and rushing with myriad lights This place has dangers. The fantasy mode is very strong here. His surface thought is suddenly invaded by a point that unfolds into a picture or diagram, an abstract multidimensional webwork glimmering in his mind. A field organization. He feels moods being seized and compressed, memories manipulated; his focus suddenly seems to dissolve, flow in unknown directions and recover itself on some unexperienced dimension. Tensions he was unaware of melt with a snap. - Feel a frog face woman elder behind which this extended grasp is working.
- transit diagram He is not a mortal man to be damaged, he is not more than a pattern of energy seeking to penetrate some resistance. Operating by image: "with a vague fierce image of pulling open a great switch." The last imperative of the great task is stilled forever. In the high energies of this place he has found it easy to form a simulacrum. a lilac so beautiful it seems to require no translation. She's in control of us all really. And as we go ever in this great journey, however long it lasts, different acts will seem more urgent or right. We don't know our powers. So let us rescue what we find to rescue, experience what we can, change what seems good to change. Let's try it all. vane fane, small flag, fana "a thin plate of metal or wood" On every side, above, below, before, beyond, blaze steady fires of amethyst, topaz, ruby, emerald and diamond, ultramarine - drift upon drift of them, burning against blackness or veiled in filaments and gauzes of hypnotic allure. They are, she realizes slowly, stars. -
He's a sensitive and what else Earlier alarm waking, points of light three dimensional in blue. That was a clue for the sense of knowing. -
a tight line For this light binds the sky together, like the hawser that strengthens a trireme, and thus holds together the whole revolving universe. vector - vehere line representing The inward work of the stone is its downward inclination. and spangled heavens Thesmophoria - kathados - 3 days downgoing, 3 days upcoming
-
There is something wrong with the constructed common knowledge. story of particles and transparent outlines -
McCullin An Loc in Vietnam.
With persons. Again remember. To know anything, have to assume nothing and work. I find the other in me. Is it easy or hard. As understanding, hard. Meetings in moods. What is - [first outline for notes in origin the multimedia show, sound edit notes] A noise as of silk and something is floating around me, it is transparent, the dead talk to me. A special relation to death Depersonalization Doesn't dare place his being either in his body or in this outside world. They are pictures of Feb 24 In a flexible motion
I remember all images: hardly anything I see in this world ever leaves my mind. I've tried to create my own journey into life with my camera and I haven't done too badly. Don McCullin 1979 Homecoming Macmillan [first showing of notes in origin in Roy Kiyooka's studio-gallery on Powell, Jean-Vi and Kathryn come from Seattle and stay with us] Going to the show, on Hastings at the bus stop, Chinese evening dress through the street lights. Are they going to a wedding party. She looks straight and glossy in her black jacket. On my right, the rose color petals spilled across the threshold of my work room. Giddy, possessed gladly by a goddess. I'm badly dressed and tired but it doesn't matter. Don to Roy "I'll do it, you go back to ---," in a voice like family efficiency. She appeared suddenly on my left as if there'd been a glitch. Kathryn on her knees fixed the sound by moving the cord. On a chair eating wormy noodles out of styrofoam with small Japanese chopsticks. "It said you weren't available. I loved that." People begin to fill the room. Kim's friend startling us both. Franches-ka. "Really?" we say and it's not what it seems. Was she offended away. Know the sequence for the machines. Turn on the tape recorder and it's a while, then "The grass is luminous" in an amplified quiet voice. Ah the voice isn't going to be wrong. I don't see how they see the pictures but I hear how they are hearing the voice. Corrall that private word. Many small parts. "Your mother's dresser, that moved me." When we'd gone excited to bed and couldn't sleep. The pronoun and marveling at what she may think I did. The whole dark room, heads bent over onto chests. The quiet. Apple juice. "I've never seen a reading where people were so curled over, like flowers." J-V in a dark stretch toward the bus. Not liking the applause. "He went right to the question." "And she really answered him. She was very with you too." She's between him and Daphne. [letter to my mom] Yes it was fun to see you. Last Sunday night at a gallery here, the show: all the slides from up north, some tapes and some writing read onto tape. Preparing it was intense happy work. J looked after me and I just worked hour after hour until it was Sunday night and thirty? people came, sat on the floor and couches of quite a small room. It was two and a half hours long. Many spells of listening only, sitting in the dark concentrating on sound (thunderstorm, the single frog, dinner table conversation, I read some of the letters to Jam about things that happened). I wanted to make a context for the beautiful pictures and also to make something where the audience would see slides and then, listening, would see in their minds the pictures given by the written description. It was quite complex. Many people said the slides were wonderful - most of the audience were artists of some kind - and they are, but I was more interested in the writing and sound. Having a show fired me, we both liked the concentration so much we'd like deadlines oftener, to be able to just let go and work with all our might. After the show was over I realized that what I had put together, with some polishing, is likely to turn out to be the movie I've promised the Canada Council: ie that obligation is closer to finished, than I knew. It was a fine audience who gave everything an exceptional attention, they are people who know how to look and listen. During some of the long tapes when they were sitting in the dark listening, the room was full of bodies with their heads bowed, quite motionless: it looked to me like a prayer meeting, some religious occasion. Being able to show parts of my past and present to those people seemed an extraordinary privilege, and essential. Four or five women said how interesting, ambiguous and strong they found your voice. -
A baby in a womb lifted in the back of the van. It's heavy. With each a moon is born. White globe (size for two hands). Who was there, father, can't remember. Luke felt different. He nursed with love. This one isn't real in that way. The other baby is an elephant. It's weak, I haven't fed it, things are strewn, will I be able to go on doing what - This happened when my breasts had begun to be pretty again, now they'll .... Take the elephant baby a bowl of milk with crumbs of yeast in it. See the milk drawn into the trunk like a straw. Then I see him in uniform going away to war. Short childhood. To a house where I'm living. Some of the books can't be brought, the Pound books must be obviously harmless, bring them. Someone downstairs says something challenging my right to go upstairs. I say I live with her (J). At the top of the stairs M comes out with two business looking women, she speaks with a mouth like Anne's, ironic. Was it a message, is she fleeing. Somewhere on the stubble ridge in a machine. Is it going to follow the swather. Down a steep short hill plunge. Back and up again looking for the right place. Am I going to be working? J's Auntie Annie fish chin last night glare hatred. -
The way reading has to be done with eyes and sense of space. Voice is alone. And writing the way I've said it has to be looking at something. Participate in the soul's union with itself Her kink: necessary reference to straight sex Making the charge "It didn't have enough charge for me" Exquisite delight Brevity is Is that thrill another part opening. Basement images. When you get past the archetype of straight sex you'll get to landscape and space. -
Pale east colored light pictures
|