| the golden west volume 1 part 3 - 1994 august-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
25th August, Pender Street
26 The way the male generic pronoun in good books makes those books obsolete in part. It is jarring to have to feel and go on feeling again and again what is parochial and even ill-intentioned in an author we are identifying with as we read, as if we were forced to confront an author's racism in every other sentence, the author's unconsciousness and therefore the possibility that we in our own poses of furthest authority may be as unconscious, as parochial, as implicated in an injustice as glaringly evident as this one can be seen to be, once those excluded have insisted forcefully enough. 27
28 Louie dreamed she stood with me in a theatre. A huge screen opened up and on it was an image of a river, black, with just a glint to show it a river, and a sky, red and black. It is a film she has made with me. The theatre's manager, a very ordinary woman, blond, brings her the show's brochure. It has a small picture of the red and black river. I am not there anymore. The woman sits waiting with a pencil: Louie is supposed to dictate a description of the work. She cannot. She can't bring it to words. She takes the pencil herself. She tries to write. Tiny green worms are there in place of writing. She keeps on. Now she knows, she is ready to dictate. She gives the pencil back to the woman. Write this: There is, balanced in the midst of the river, a triangle whose three points are injury, balance, and process. But first write this: You are hurt. 30th Nicole Gingras has invited me to a festival in Montreal. I want to go be happy with people. And Phil on the phone when I'm asking for a SSHRC letter says, I missed you this afternoon. I missed you too! I say joyfully, before I think. We laugh, both voices. Dennis showed me the new philosophy department. New offices. Maybe a window with alders and mountains. This time it's more exciting, as if this time it's real, this time it's welcoming me. As if it is another university, one that has accepted my whole real curriculum. It said yes to my topic, to my mix and my longing. What is my topic and mix and longing? My topic has been mine almost to my first memory. I am mixing it with dancing for pleased fathers. My longing is to dance as well as the best, to be splendid and to bring in everything. 3rd September Working in the garden thru the two hours of evening. It was dark as I came home. The amazingly beautiful glow of the amber light and then the red - look at the handwriting switch when I saw that. Working, I had been looking at colors and shapes - casually, the way I do: the grey-brown bristly strings of the dead viper's bugloss threaded up thru the living whips of the incense rose in the corner, young sorrel clumps strung together so that when I've pulled one there's another being ripped up by its thread. The pleasure of clearness when I weed underneath something. All of it is pleasure. Unconscious. When I finished a section or carried armfuls of weeds to the pile I'd notice the light, the sky. This afternoon I worked with myself young. I as if went with her to talk to him. My dad. And then younger, to after I got back [from the hospital]. I was mad at him, but her, my mother, I wouldn't look at. I blanked her out. Go to before it happened, the book said. Mama! I feel it in the image but my body is rigid. Now go again to after. Cold despising. You slime, you creep, I say, you didn't care. He makes her admit it; we walk away. - It was the big man [star man, imagined helper] who sat nearby when I spoke to my father. You have to listen to her, he said to my dad. Through it there was a difference between the feeling in the image and the feeling in the body. That means I have to go there again. The man was like the space man who gave me my writing in the dream. I promised the little one she could call me when she wants. 10th It is early morning. I am beside the sea, looking at the water. It is dark blue, calm, clean and warm. I am wanting to step into it. There is no one else awake. There is nothing in front of me but water to the horizon, limpid lively water, a blue I can see into. It is slightly later, not more than half an hour. I step into the water realizing that now there are many people and it is no longer appropriate to be naked, as I am. I need to get to deeper water quckly. But the ocean floor is sloping very gradually. It is still shallow where there is a large hulk of a decaying building. I walk through its courtyard. There are some remnants of what used to be made there, blankets or rugs maybe. It is so decrepit that it seems dangerous. - Oh Calabria. I haven't been here since. Money in my pocket. Car insured. Nervous in case. Act natural. Talk about Sunflower. She wrote love woman with irony and great longing. The question was, why does it make us happy? Because Rebecca loves her in us. Rebecca knew her nakedly - Rebecca wasn't hedging. Rebecca wasn't flying at an altitude. I read her last summer thinking she was Louie. White vans, I shouldn't look. I boiled in my own juices reading her and then there he was. Rebecca West 1987 Sunflower Viking It's a grey Saturday morning so full of junk, cars parked and passing, many colors, people miscellaneous in their many colors too, the jumble of shop fronts and signs. I'm hungry for this coffee strongly burnt and practical. This table has heart built into its net by now, sweet heartache. What would I say if I didn't already know: Luke lying across my bed last night, the top half of him, a man who has liked lying on girls' beds talking to them since he was a schoolboy. He's telling me about phoning Manuela in London. Her mom has answered the phone. "I said, 'Is Manuela around?' She said, 'No but Miguel is standing right here saying Oh wicked! Oh wicked!'" We're giggling together, I because I love his giggle, I love how much he likes it that his longtime friend loves him, and I love his ear that likes what neither of us could explain about the exactness of tone transmitted by that phrase. Miracle, miracle that he's by me. Miracle that he's this loose boy now, wearing a baseball cap backwards and sounding not at all rationalistic. Talking about debt counseling and the Surrey airfields. What else. Louie in her room that sees the ships on their sea, sleek silver under rain. I've spoken to her almost every day and not taken large fright. My office on the mountain - having an office, having a desk a bookcase and a window sighting straight out onto clouds forming in the alder banks. Aristotle - trying to read something untranslated because untranslatable, a sort of reading where every theoretical noun is underdetermined the way the cards are - logos, pathos. I try to feel the shape of the relations between the terms and so find meanings that will fit. An uninterpreted model is what I am thinking of. The other historical readings are like that too, except that what I feel in them is sometimes a lot of models superposed. Maybe three or four different intuitions attaching to the same term - 'imagination' for instance - each of them with attachments to some but not all of the rest of the possibilities. Imagining = falsified desire = structure = metaphorical capacity = recognition = evocation = simulation = empathy/imprinting = consciousness itself = subtle body. 14 Can I keep up - it was a simple life and now isn't - five tutorial groups - the whole history of men talking about imagining - graduate seminar in computer graphics, Loki's visualization tapes and books, meeting with David Fracchia next week, media lab's tapes - Nathalie - Louie - garden clubhouse - herb garden - Luke - SSHRC application before I go to Montreal in two weeks - keep an eye on the car - think about Notes in origin, dust it off - bio and description of garden photo show for East Van Cultch - book work and Joyce - journal - house mending and cleaning - Rowen - is there more? Dreams. 16 I need something - I've worked today - a bit - reading vis proceedings - cleaned my house - went to the Film Board and watched the tapes - shopped afterward - and now I want love - a movie? - no, sex, romance, beauty, action - the garden if it weren't nightfall - him - or some other him - an out from the dead land into tears and color - Then Luke knocked - What did I see [on vis tapes] today. A cube rotating, made of white mist I could see into. Heat inside a television set like a flow of fire in a mysterious room. Reading Durand, Hillman. Hermaneutical bachelors whining about losses of political ground. Imagination is enlisted. I am not sympathetic and yet I also want to defend imagining as if it is something I am, and some other power base is not. The hermaneuticists call empiricism their enemy. An empiricist is not necessarily a naturalist, but naturalists are my friends, and Aristotle wanting to notice a psychology is my friend as much as Plato is. There is a religion I would like: Fechner's and James's, where a plant is a mind, and the earth is, and imagining could be a way of listening in, and of working for, the larger minds. 22nd There was an older man making a series of moves with such precision and decision I was in awe. I know there is nothing I can say that will bring the quality of his action to mind - I can't remember it, I don't even know what scale it was on, whether they were gestures over days or moments. He was some sort of performer, a magician of the whole body, a quality of Pierrot and Jewish standup, with a somber or serious dignity, a dark suit. He was so fast I could not follow his motion. It is five-thirty in the dark, black at the window though there is morning sound, cheeps and motors, a truck's horn on Clark. I woke with my solar buzzing. Strong contained pressure. What is that? After two days at school I am tight and speedy, and wake talking like an intellectual. Unpleasant. It makes me nostalgic for the clean life of cleaning and emotional work, the clean fuel of that emotion, a life with doors and windows open and a wind. In the garden, more than any other time it is when every leaf and every weed counts in vistas supernally beautiful. I can sit down anywhere and look across and through and see everything brewed in the same gold-powder light, leaf and leaf and leaf and grass and grass and sumac berry over there and orange amaranth stalk and silk tree fringe. The dust in the light. The way the color-change is adjusted by it. It isn't mist, it isn't dust, I don't know what it is, but it has mist's quality of seeming to be made of speck-lamps that illuminate leaves not from the far sky but from all around, not the strong cold light of a mist, but a near warm honey glow. 24 Saturday morning. Early at the Calabria, the Saturday morning crowd isn't here yet. I am in the mirror opposite - brown arms, purple teeshirt, dead black patch of hair. What's up -anxious since yesterday - work with the book I didn't see through - I guess. I was hovering between bathroom and bedroom feeling the bookwork is taking me so far into craziness that my tutorial classes are looking at me with derision and every exchange at university betrays me and I am the only one who doesn't know - Then I went to bed with Strindberg's occult diary - creepy old Strindberg manufacturing slime out of god, sex, booze and Swedenborg, wanting an occult explanation of fantasy sex. But do I know more than Strindberg could? We don't have the fear of god like bedclothes wrapped around our legs, we don't have scruples about lawful marriage to condense our anxiety. What anxiety - anxiety about possession, loss of own soul. But it is anxiety itself that is loss of soul. There are possessed states that are sure of themselves so it doesn't matter who they are. Sureness is felt as one's own. Anxiety is felt as influence. Is that right? To notice: as soon as Louie makes trouble I want to ditch her. The most interesting moment in Strindberg the one where she hooked him, or he hooked himself - there is no way to tell. 27 Maybe a note about Sunday night. I was trying to get to the SSHRC application when Louie phoned. How are you doing etc. When I've said at some length, she says Lindy was raped last night, and she crumbles. I don't like the crumble. I shift my voice lower to control it. I suggest action, interpret her position. I am annoyed she has passed on a charge that will spoil my concentration. I say, Phone rape relief right now. Then I go work with my system for a while. It says anger. I call Louie. I say I'll stay with her while she talks to her book. She is instantly back in overwhelming emotion. Go with it, I say, I'll be here. She immediately has two - I don't know what to call them - items. One is the anger of a woman she visited who has cancer. The other something about her mother's letter. She tells the stories in her overwhelmed crying voice that has the sound of - what? - self-pity? - at her own sensitivity: Why do I have to be like this, so overwhelmed. "I'm afraid that if I let this in it will be the end of all my pleasure in life." Apparently that's not how it works, I say, being guarantor. I don't say much. "You could ask your book to lead you." But by then it's done. We are sitting in a lovely little peacefulness. I have turned off my light to speak to her in the dark, and now I see the top of the hemlock in the form of a statue of an angel set to look down over the streets. It's the angel Temperance, we say. Full feeling, full initiative. 1st October, Avenue du Parc [Les absences de la photographie, Montreal, week-long film and video festival curated by Nicole Gingras] I've been aware of writing with a French accent. It is Jacques, who was sleeping on the other side of the wall and has given me his good bed. He and Nicole both have bird eyes. Very different birds. The beings told by their faces live another life from the beings told in courtesy by their speech. He is more feral than his speech. His eyes are living a life like the life mine live: moments of so cold a curiosity. That is a distinction, I think. I was looking at the collection of old women on the plane. They came past one by one to stand in line for the washroom. I could see the twenty-year-old girl in them as naïve as ever, padded over. I feel them as horribly failed, as if they've only lived so that something, eventually, hundreds or thousands of years from now, can come of their line. That wouldn't be horrible in a cell, why is it horrible in them? It looks horrible. 2 A moment yesterday at the breakfast table with Jacques. He was saying men have been having a hard time in their relations with each other. I'd like to hear about it, I say. Jacques is blushing. There is another where I am talking about the epistemology of grain, which will put knowing onto a base that includes the body. They will try to keep the old epistemology going, but it's finished, it's over. I say that and have a sudden press of tears in my eyes. They were as if a certificate, I noticed, that I had come to a realness with him that I had not expected. This morning he brought a small photo to the table. I think it is time to show you this, I think he said. Oh such a face, so soft, so melted. 3rd His mother's face the way a baby might have seen it, his own face behind black plexi. The grain in tiny shreds, the black full of movement. Months, years on a single image. I said nostalgia is when you think you don't have it any more, and that is because you are trying to come to it this way - right hand draws an arc right to left across the front of the body. It is still there but you have to come to it this way - right to left again, but behind, across the back of the head. Speaking tonight. What I'll say. I've been looking for a way to think about image experience so it would include remembering, seeing pictures, reading, conversing, dreaming, any abstract activity. Way that doesn't talk about 'the image,' talks about structure, evocation of structure. I mean physical structure. A picture of the brain as a volume of water with a very fine fast electrochemical structure. Coleridge's image of trees in a wind. The leaves moved by a wind, he said, was emotion; trunks and branches still. The not-immaterial medium which seems immaterial. The freeze frame and long take are to give time enough to let a structure gel. Some of the questions I've had are -
Intuition has to do with the remarkable fact of recognition, a sort of knowing that doesn't know what it knows and so puts out an image of it to keep until it does know. Recognition implies not necessarily a hidden person knowing what we don't know, but - and there is a model that can say this - a structure that is accomplished but unexercised, a structure the body has accomplished but our social or linguistic life hasn't called for. How dreams talk about body electric structure, is often by states of water or landscape. Where dreams want to talk about dreaming they speak about it in terms of art, a gallery of paintings, a book of photos, a film. 4th Elsa Stansfield, Madelon Hooykaas. Madelon a cheerful wife, bulky at the middle, wearing the sort of clothes a professional wife wears, scarf, raincoat, sweater some kind of chenille-y lacey thing. Greying wheatcolored strong-looking hair. I looked at the two of them coming in and thought: they're a couple. Private, established, oldish. Nicole calls me to be introduced. By now I've realized they are the famous two women who make videos. The other woman, the one I saw taking the step down in a careful way, comes very near when she listens to me. At first I think her English isn't good but then I hear what sounds like some kind of English accent. I'm beginning to see her. I'm fascinated. I start to ask her anything to be able to watch her speak. I'm trying to imagine her a girl: she is in front of me a small stooped Scotsman humorous and shrewd, a very small Voltaire. She is a Scot, a small townswoman, and she's a boy. She's grey but was fair, and there is the sharp blue eye of a witty lad. But who was the girl who became these people, north of Glascow in a hurry to leave. 7th Old rocks. Sumacs and maples. Apples on the ground, old trees with low branches. Blue green red and yellow. Between rows are sightlines. I'm thinking of Jacques, the face he is. Points. A point at the top of the head, short hair like a pointed cap. Sharp corners on his eyes. His face unsmiling is hard to take. Hard. So particular. It was a face I knew when I saw it at the airport. It is not a human face in the way Elsa Stanfield's is. It is of some devic order - nothing mild, something méchant. An interesting face I haven't seen enough of. I would like to see what he began with, to see what in it is what he made. You are not cold but your face is like the face of a man who could beat his children, I tell him. A very good body, light, the way now I'm light. Tall. Is that a monk on a tractor coming to tell us to go away? Their uniform acres of orchard earth laid down soft over the oldest rock in the world. A monk in grey work clothes. These thousands of leaves on thousands of trees rustling. Anne and Suzanne do not want the monk to find them lying down. Stories I haven't told. Yesterday when we met at the table Jacques said, What is shame, for you? (Can you still hear his voice?) I began to say something about religion and the part of my show where I say Jesus aloud. Then I began again: But that's not shame. He nods, he knows it's something else. He is inviting me and I am going to accept. Shame is what I am whenever I am walking on the street, because of the way I walk. I am shame whenever I'm with people. When I thought of beginning to speak I had my left hand over the left side of my mouth. I name myself: I say, When I walk on the street I have a false image of myself because I don't want to be in the consciousness of a crippled woman. I am trying the name on him. I'm not sure he knows the English word. I know he does know shame. An hour later he brings me the photo he's using in his installation in two weeks. The phone rings. I'm left with the photo. I look at it for fifteen minutes. It's the left side of a young man's face and neck. Only highlights. His fingers have moved and so are doubled. They are hiding the left side of his mouth. I've stared at it for a long time before I see something ambiguous beyond the fingers, two spots of light that can be read as an open mouth. When I've looked even longer I see that one of the strong sweeps of light on the edge of the ear - one of the strongest lights in the image - can read as a little penis entering its softly opened mouth. It is a man hiding, wanting to hide, what his mouth wants. It is a picture of a man's life of trying to hide the part of him that is a woman's part. It is a perfect picture of a man. When Jacques comes from the telephone I begin to say so. It couldn't be the picture of a wo-man? he says. No, there's something here, in the neck, and here. It's a man, but it's a gay man. He's shocked. I'm astonished. Didn't he mean to say what this so perfectly says? "I'm sorry." "No, no, you 'ave not frighted me, I am fright' myself. You 'ave jus' trigger me." - But this is not the time to trigger you. I don't want the last two weeks of his work to know more than he has wanted to know. There will be a loop running twenty seconds of a small whole figure of a man projected into the black space on the left side of this face. Fade in, fade out, like a thought. I understand. The man whose life is being told is suffering a relation to the image of a man. Jacques describes the appearance and disappearance of the little projected figure - yes, that - onto the transparent figure - yes, that - in formal terms. I think: is that how it has to be done? "It is so strong, I was sure you had intended it." I haven't said what he said, I mean the man to whom I said that when I walk in the street I am shame because of the way I walk, and the man who was hiding from himself that he was showing himself hiding. "But you have lover, you have friend, you are a beautiful wo-man, desirable." In the lobby of the Goeth' last night after Jarman's Blue I sit down next to him. He has his arms folded across his chest. I talk about the sound, Brian Eno. And so on. Then I say, And when he said "Kiss me" . Oh! Jacques says. His arms spring open. You too? and then he say it a secon' time and it's even more . He thumps his heart. Ah. I knew he was feeling that. (This brings me another story I haven't told. In Vancouver before I left, the book said to me, Deal with cancer: find your instruction to the body. I didn't find anything big but I got into forehead, other places. Suddenly there came the sensation of so romantic a kiss. Where did it come from? What could it have to do with releasing a cramp intended to cut off cancer? I had been talking to the cells saying, I will trust you to look after me, I won't be trying to do it myself with a hard instruction from the top. Saying this, I do know where the kiss came from, who it came from, why it came.) - That woman with her bulky stomach and glassy eyes, gappy teeth, is "talking to women about landscape and film," she says. Why? Because when she's alone in the countryside she founders in fear, she tells me. That's amazing, I say, not kindly. I am appalled but remember to be interested. I turn around in the car seat - I know something you can do - sometime when you're there and your friend is there and you feel safe you could lie down and imagine being there and feel where in your body the fear is. Usually it's in the throat or the solar plexus or the forehead or the heart, I say, touching those places eagerly. She cuts me off. I don't believe in the existence of the body, the body is a social construct, she says. I am astonished again, what can she mean? She has swimming Celtic pupils and is a redhead. If she said she believed in fairies I would not have been astonished. "I'm a nurse, I've seen people ." This is not making sense, a nurse who doesn't believe in the existence of the body? We have arrived at the Goethe Institute. Hostile, I'd say. This woman is massively unwilling to know herself, either out of ambition or out of terrorization. Berzerk. We don't like each other but it's more than that. We disliked each other at first sight. 9th Toronto Jacques this morning, "This is not the last time in my life I will see you." When he said sorry yesterday by catching my hand I think I jumped - did I jump? That he was making amends touched me so much I escaped back into the theatre. This morning when I put my arms around him he leaned over to be my size. It was a translucent embrace. He backed out of it before I was ready, quite soon. I said he had hard eyes, photographer's eyes. He said he sees my face suddenly become much younger. "It happens so fast. It happens so fast." I ask when he saw it. He says there at the table and also when I spoke in public. So fragile. That Nicole thinks I am artistic in the way I am and move, that for André I was the discovery of the week and he was too shy to say so. The story he told last night about what he called his first relation to photography. There was an album with family photos. He would take it into the basement to a place where a small shaft of light came through a window. He'd open the album and look at a photo of his father. I really took him in, the rhythm of his French, the amount of energy there is in his mouth, which I re-see always in profile, and there it is a primate mouth, protruded in the French way. 10th Flying over a place as bare as a prairie but pitted with waterholes, thousands, water of different colors, milky brown, milky green, milky grey-blue, charcoal, celadon, milky purplish grey. A scarred scabby land - oh there's a bright olive green, and immediately below, a clay white. Dakota I think, interesting land, coulees in scribbles. Cultivated land with a white bloom come to the surface like first clouds of cream in coffee. There's a river green as a field, brown as a field. The coulees are drawn in dark that's maybe shadow, maybe scrub. Rounded creases. He calls the motion of grain a frottement. There's a mine, parallel lines, cicatrice. Settling tanks white black and brown, African textile. Sometimes stripes. A more deeply gouged land. The abraided white is like alkali staining. So interesting. It overlies the gully shapes in a patchy way. It looks like what it must be, a scouring off of the land's skin. Oh. Here's cloud. A perfect subtlety of color, stubble orange, summerfallow grey-brown, bluish dark shadow, those scabs of white. Geometry laid over rumpled moleskin. Look at this sea of cloud. Not firm shapely cloud, diffuse melted cloud that lets yellow light down onto the moleskin nap. So ridgy and lumpy, now, and where there's a small smooth place there'll be two striped fields laid at an angle. Those gullies are deeper and woolly, they're treed. It's almost unpopulated. A million coyotes. I love the way the plane rides, as if solely by the grain of the fine vibration I think my body likes. The grain of the voice. Its voice. La graine de la voix, he says they say. The way these vapor fibers move. So tenderly. There's ice on those lakes. Why the prairie looks so painted. The marks of a brush. Dabbing and combing. There's a real mountain, one of those mountains on the plain. Are we even higher? We're very high. Thank you eyes. Nicole said, I think you will make a film with more narrative. I said I've been very helpless with my writing. It is ecstatic to be here, the movies continue. A grain film for Jacques. Look how grainy these clouds. There - look at that completely organized little flock, shapely like a grove on a hill. There are the Rockies coming. It's the last of these ecstatic prairies. How can carved volumes and rational color be so thrilling. There is snow drawing the cracks and ridges. Old logging roads drawn yellow in dark green, concentric like a fingerprint. Now it's a plain between ridges, hayfields probably, new green. An irrigation circle that's not this year's. Shabby. Times during the movies when I wanted away from the film there was, and would go into transported sex or else a version of the story where Ken is on my porch knocking. "Don't close the door." On the evergreen ridges there are flecks of poplar. Flecks. E.Etc. David Larcher's grandness, his daring. I am desire quite sharp. Look at that, my thumb and the page with its writing, the diagonal strip that's in sun riding evenly, tranquilly, in color washed with blue-grey, over the opposite flow of blue-grey cloud. The thumb is perfectly a little penis. The pencil comes into the light and writes, but I don't see that. I'm going to be bold to put sexual pleasure into this film. Look at the rim of blue on the round lip of the jet intake. Sweet big lips. Bisexually bold. The grain-shiver in the cunt at this moment, the airplane's voice singing into especially that part. Vancouver 12th Wednesday morning. The heat just came on, that smell of I don't know what. It's eight o'clock, the sky is clear, up there in the second pane with three wires and some fuzz of cloud. There are my new sheepskin slippers, like Tibetan boots, dark turquoise blue and white. My feet when I'm looking at them feel the woolly linings voluptuously. 17 Why have I written so little since I got back from Montreal? A week ago. And in Montreal too. Meantime. It's raining, winter setting in. I'm going into it without a passion. Dry work. Aristotle - the way he can only make sense if I have a working theory already, and then his shreds of antique material can be patched onto the completed outline. I'm struggling in contexts (I mean texts) where people try to decipher. And why are they and I giving lifetime to trying to do what we can't do: say what they meant. 'A tradition.' Wanting to lead something through. It is like a (rooted) plant trying to put down roots it knows to replace the roots it has but doesn't know. I mean something has been led through tho not necessarily from the loci cited. I'm changed. Am I changed? Is what I'm asking. The system seems to be teaching me to work with the brain directly. 18 Waking not wanting to be awake. What is it? Dullness, the dullness that wants to eat fruit because it is color and alive. 20th Yesterday at the department - was I imagining it? - people turning away, doors closing. How many people in this department are dualists, I ask Phil. He's awkward. Is reading something in my question. 21st It's Friday. An open sky, a shining sky. Last night after gales of rain walking out to the parking lot under large scalloped masses of cloud rimmed with silver, and the clear sea between them, the see, clear to infinity and finely darkly kindled in every pore by the moon swimming at large and out of sight. I wanted to write a complex sentence, seeing the simplicity of the dream accounts when I opened the book. Yesterday as I was yawning in Norman's lecture I caught sight of a student quite far down on the left whose yawn was ending just as mine ended - that was one student of a couple of hundred, and one I don't know. I was imagining an entrainment affecting people who are in subtle agreement of mood or even background - that maybe he was a Mennonite kid from Dawson Creek. Paul Wong read a paper Tuesday, Locke and Kripke. Sat there with his glasses on looking sexy, I thought. His broad Mongol face and full mouth, and that professorial peering thru horn rims. He's humanly there. And then the story I heard last night eating with him at midnight on the Drive. His mother, thrown downstairs by his father when she is carrying Paul, takes her little girl and leaves. Works to support them, later as a nanny among foreign families in the mid-levels. Paul lives with his grandparents until he is about nine and then moves in with his mother. He is Chinese in Hong Kong but his context is German, British, American, Canadian. He's foreign and of the servant class. His mother emigrates to New Westminster when he's in his teens. He's an angry boy. Then he decides to make it and does well in high school. University is a shock. He wants a community of intelligence but no one cares. He quits but comes back. He wants to last it out and change it. This kind of account seems hardly worth writing down, the writing is so mechanical. Where was the liveliness in hearing the story? - partly in the delicious food and the nearness to the street outside, a very clean window looking onto a clean airy night with young people in couples passing very close-by but as if unobserved, on wet pavement and under a young tree whose yellow leaves are hanging sparse under a streetlight. A piano player in the next room. And seeing Paul's face changed into the moon face of a lucid child puzzled at finding himself outside privilege - seeing it in as if firelight, the good lighting of the Latin Quarter. Ways he is still outside privilege. Short, stocky, and linguistically handicapped more than he knows, far from the WASP smoothness of Noah or Dave, which signals an upper hand in any department. 22nd Sylvia yesterday on the street, greenish and bony but beautiful too, a beautiful wise sharp face, says, " And my relationship with Kenneth has changed." The prim way she speaks, correct. "Are you lovers? " "Yes." She means: I won, you lost. I plunge into the replies I can be proud in. Good for him, he's finally got to something real. Good for you too, you worked for it, you lasted it out. I mean those things but the pain I take away, feeling I deserve it too, is pain that they used me. Both did. He especially. It is right that they have come to it finally, but why was I there, why did he involve me? Because he could, and it served him. And you - why did you encourage me - you - you misled me - you led me badly - you used me too, didn't you. Who are you working for? I feel you beneficent and maybe you are, I'd want you to work for them as well as me. But what about me, I say, crying. That's as far as I know. You led me into a dream I can hardly remember. I should ditch you. Yes, you say. You could have said, He's poison, stay away. You said, Call him. You said love him more. Show yourself more. Don't hedge. Offer him everything. You said that! You still think it was good advice? Yes, you say. What is this like. Sore heart. Helpless endurance. Promise me something will come of it. I do promise, you say, better judgment will come of it. And what is this better judgment good for? End of delusion, just that. You set me up to get kicked in the heart. Yes. I don't know what delusion you have in mind, but I know I still want something like him. Love woman still wants what she wants. I repressed her before. I'll have to repress her again. Yes. Do you call that progress? Yes. You are crucifying me. Yes. Why? For the sake of your judgment. Do you want to kill me? No. What do you want to make of me? It is love woman you want to kill, you want me to sacrifice her. Who are you, to want that? And then Louie's book took it on: How far back would you want to go to undo it? Back to before Dave, I say, I don't want to have opened up to people who don't want me. That throws me on the floor sobbing. I feel there's nowhere I can go to be real. She's using a reasoning tone and I feel myself turning my head, shaking my head, very young. "What are they saying?" "I don't know, I don't know what I'm saying, I think I'm kind of gone to pieces." "What should they be saying?" "Someone should be lifting me." "That's right," says the deep voice of the book. "Who?" "It's my mother." "Does she want to lift you?" "I don't know." "Where are you, at home?" "No, in the hospital." "How are you now?" "I am holding my heart." "Afterward, do you let it go?" "I feel as if there is no afterward, everything stops there. I never stop holding it." And then Louie lapses for a moment into speaking on her own behalf. "How would it be if there were someone sitting beside you and they were holding their heart too?" I notice but keep going. "What I see instead is someone behind me putting their hands into my back and holding it like this." "How is that?" "It relaxes. My chest is airy." "Now what happens if there is someone else holding their heart?" "I lean my head against their back like this and put in my hands like this." "How is that?" "It's nervous in the solar plex." "I saw that you got worried. Go back to where someone is holding yours. Watch and see where you start to get worried." "It's as if I think there can be only two people and if I am holding theirs they can't be holding mine. If I hold theirs before I'm ready." "Alright see their hands, what are they doing?" "The right hand is stroking the heart." "What happens?" "There's more life comes into my neck and face and here at the top of the head." "Now what's happening?" "They are massaging it quite hard, like this." "Why?" "That's what it wants, it is such a strong, deep muscle." "It's not because it is tired or weak?" "No, it is like wanting to wrestle, it wants that kind of hard contact. It's contact." Then she thinks of Jacob wrestling the angel. I think of wrestling with Ken and the way he held me afterwards, all the way up, even his toes were holding me. "He thought I was challenging his manhood but that wasn't it, I was greeting it, I was wanting to feel it." We start laughing about angels and a ladder. She tells me Rowen's advice to his young self - You live with Ellie and visit me on weekends, not while I'm at school. 25 Sore this morning. Gnawing. What is it exactly. I felt it was Ken but it's not exactly that. A kind of miserable hunger. What would satisfy it? Touch? Love. What kind of love? The gnawedness is like interpretation, therapy, giving me substitutes, lifeless food. It is a kind of stress not to have the real thing. Physical addiction? Yes. I need sex. Oh. What for? To mend me. Can it? Yes. 27 Last night before falling asleep I saw my mother's face and felt her maybe the way I used to, maybe the way other people keep each other going in absences. A younger face? A realer face, a more felt face. 28 This is for dream aesthetics, admiring its skill: A medievalist group drilling on a field not far away. They're hooded, in tunics. I'm not sure of the color, as if somber tones of dark red and lighter grey. There are four or five rows of perhaps ten. They're well-drilled, very precise, so when they wheel in formation there is a satisfying perfection of the ripple. It is as if lines of silver on their costumes catch the light. There is a beautiful effect of ranks of vertical silver lines wheeling through angles of reflectance. Their banners are beautiful too, as if made of bones like a fish spine flowing through a turn. The largest banner has an emblem among its bones. 2nd November Wednesdays the computer graphics people. The media lab. 4th Something else I have been thinking is how I keep putting myself into scenes where I am the stranger. A woman of fifty sitting ignored among graduate students having dinner together in a café. What am I doing there, where I lose everything I know? That, losing everything I know. Armin sat beside me like a ghoul, massively self-pitying: I just broke up with my girlfriend, he pronounces to anyone he can. He is a heavy wheel turning very slowly on an axle clogged with grease. Brows squashed down over his eyes and then his beaky nose and then his thin little mouth, a plastic face seeming to be more stretched and compressed than before, the look of depression so bizarre it astonishes. I regard him with so little sympathy that it's as if I believe he's faking for the sake of attention he can't draw any other way. Ego's nightmare, to be Armin. 6 Dinner at Phil's with his daughters. Vanessa is reading Jane Eyre, Adrienne is drawing an evil grey-black being with glowing red horns looking at herself in a large mirror with a thorny green frame. Vanessa has a small oval face, pink and fine, and speaks with the large authoritative precision of a forty year old professor of English Literature. Adrienne has a larger face, ivory-colored, and a lovely informal shovel nose. Vanessa dissembles responsibly, Adrienne lurks until there is suddenly something she wants to say. She is twelve and tall. I asked Phil whether he has an interesting dream life and he said you do, I said to Vanessa across the table. That was what brought Adrienne on. "I have dreams too." She wanted to talk about her shark dreams. While I showed slides to Phil and Vanessa she was illustrating the cover of a book called Adrienne's Dreams. Sharply curling blue waves below, bits of cloud curve above - unusual bits of arc floating together quite Buddhistically. Phil cooking moules marinières in his furry slippers. Adrienne is feeling the mussels dying as the wine broth starts to boil. Phil has his arms around her and is laughing, looking at his watch. "They are dying right about ... now." He is more red-faced than sometimes. As if his spine has curved, his brow is a little closer to his chin. A hard round pot carried high. He still has so much the aura of boyish good looks that the visibility of alcohol and lack of exercise seems accidental, like an effect of the light or his clothes. But I noticed that this time I wasn't afraid I'd fancy him, and it was the pot and redness, and the collapse in his face, which lifted, though, when he played the piano. He makes remarks about the music before he plays it, "This is a wonderful sonata. There is an andante in the middle section which is ," etc. And then he plays it too loud and too declaratively, as if he is afraid of getting into it in front of me. Or maybe of getting into it at all. The melting in Beethoven was what I wanted to hear but he was playing it like Bach.
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