4th October 1996
I was at the gala last night in the great hall of the Law Courts. David Rimmer. Mary Daniels. A Spanish man said he liked my eyes because they were intense and calm. His young boyfriend kissed my cheek and said "Thank you for what you do." I was pushing through a crowd when I came up against a man in a pink jacket I'd met at Maria and Imre's party. Following him was a beautiful woman. We looked at each other. It was Susan Ksinin.
The large dark space. Men in dinner jackets. Women who look like whores. A tall woman with bare shoulders and back, breasts in boned cones, flesh thinly flabby, posing and twining rhythmlessly pretending to dance. Another woman, long black hair, classic Latin movie star face, fawning on a video camera.
In Breaking the waves I knew love woman when I saw her. That's where I've been with - here I hesitate - do I say you, or him? She's in a phone booth, he's on the rig. She says, People are telling me I shouldn't love you so much. He says, Don't ever stop telling me you love me. Say it, then. She cracks. I love you so much. She can't bear it that he's away. When I say this my heart is quaking. I can say you and the world changes. When I love you I am in faith. I talk to god. I am in joy and agony.
I have only one question in relation to you: do you need me to stop myself loving you? Does my loving you have to stop you loving me? Is there a perverse law? When I walk into the fire do I always come through? Do I come through for you too?
[notes on seeing and images]
-
Bo said that in her first year in film at Emily Carr, when she was showing her first exercise, David Rimmer said, Do you know a filmmaker called Ellie Epp? Later she had a copy of a wonderful poem I wrote, she kept photocopying it and giving it to people. Then later when I substituted at the school she came to my session though it wasn't her class. And there was one more story she was going to save for another time, she said.
I said she should meet Laiwan. I stood up to look around the room for Laiwan. Oh! Laiwan is sitting next to you. Laiwan who mixed the ink for What will we know.
Bright and dark looked nice but the text fights with the pictures and the print was dirty. I was there with Rob acknowledging him in my film community for the first time. He was horribly dressed. My voice sounded frightened and badly recorded, which it never did when I was editing.
8
[notes on the Irish from Yeats]
Two nights I've dreamed Sarah and Dave Rimmer, they're love woman and work animus.
This morning I'm aching, I have no one.
"You looked amazing when you came back. I could see immediately that ...." Sarah said.
I am so frustrated to be this heavy old scholar instead. I am protesting and blaming. I'm angry at this discipline, or is it self-suppression. My heart is sore and rebellious. We could live in transformation with each other and you won't do the work. I'm wasted month after month, untouched, in restraint, uninvited, hugely frustrated where I could be flooding. You invited me into passion and then you got distracted - so careless - how could you just wander off like that?
Make it wider: this has been the form of my perversion. How many times do I have to find it again. I was\am a girl with an enormous need to love my father, and undeniable reason to refuse to love my father. I have been all my life tight-pressed in this vise. What can I do? What have I done. When I look at the life I've had I cry with pity. I've tried so many dodges.
When I was a girl I had crushes. That means the conflict feels as if it's between love and unattainability.
Then it was Reiner - what was that. I was cute with him, I needed him devoted, I also needed to hide, I must hint but not show. That was my second strategy, enslavement.
Frank was my friend. There was strict control in the terms of the relation. We got attachment but stayed out of passion. I kept control. I got more and more anxious. Operation Dead, it has to end, I said. When I succeeded in ending it I let go and found my depth. I found it in loss.
Then it was the misery of first and second year at Queen's. Skirting sex. I kept saying, They want to conquer me, I can't let them. More of that in Europe.
Then Jerry. I found the option of women-men who didn't wake the conflict because they didn't start the passion. Laid-back sex. I'm more real - quite real - but I'm restless. I keep Don in mind and stay strictly away from him. Greg is big and I like that but he's emotionally so gutless that I'm far too safe. I'm nowhere near my capacity and its lack. I try Peter. Someone so crooked in these matters that he knows I'm crooked too. I don't even get started in all that talk.
Desser, Ian, Ron - I want to write them off as silly, and they were. What was I up to - something miscellaneous. I took up what came to me. I had no sense of what to look for. It's true I was hopeless.
Then Roy - I let it out. Both sides of it. I staggered from betrayal to betrayal. I adore; I mustn't, he is bad to me. I got to it, in a way. I adored the man who betrayed me. It was as if I came to life then, I was freer in living contradiction. I was out in the open, I was and looked instinctive. I could begin to be an artist. The fact that I was betrayed justified me: I loved and fought and that was the true solution, in as much as there was one. I cheated and lied and played: I learned from him. His dilemma was the same as mine. His solution was wild psychopathy. With Andy, Colin, John, I tried out a milder version of his wildness: love without memory. How did that work - I kept moving - I found a way to refuse and consent at the same time. It wasn't passion but it was emotion. I was perfecting a compromise.
Tony was in this sequence, in the sense that I was holding back strenuously and it was working, but his integrity supported something real I didn't trust myself with. I was up against it. He wasn't betraying me and so I had to imagine he would.
Paul K was a girl-man and after him I went to real girls. Then what happened: Maggie. Sex let go for a week or two. I was back to taking what came. Nellie. Desperate for depth. T and C. So desperate I took on drugs. I don't know what to say about that time. I had the passion, again I had a reason to stop, again I staggered. It was the Roy pattern. I released but at terrible cost. I didn't have the foundation to be able to release, the hunger was so terrible I sacrificed my brain.
That was the new most desperate dodge, sacrificial sincerity. Am I doing that now? I carried it to Jamila.
Okay, Jam. Did that turn into a new kind of effort? If I leave out the effort to learn writing, what was it? She tried to seduce me into letting go sexually. I did and then I was afraid I was in for it. She needed me to be in passion instead of her, and that was reason enough to refuse it. It was perversion, like with Trudy, of a more complicated kind. I was seducible because I was so throttled. I gave in to the seduction, I lost the struggle. I was humiliated. That's what I haven't wanted to say. It was a loss not a dodge. I didn't dodge. I needed passion so much I sold myself for it. I was defeated by Roy but worse with Trudy and Jam.
Michael and Rob. So defeated I fall back on girl-men and strict control. With Louie I work myself out of humiliation by control. But then restlessness. And now I am back at the beginning with Dave Carter and fantasy love, Ken and humiliation, David Birch and enslavement and psychopathy.
Alright, the moves have been:
- Fantasy and absence
- Control and enslavement
- Miscellany
- Girl-men, sex without passion
- Psychopathy
- Running away when it's good
- Humiliation, sacrificial sincerity
- Control and enslavement
What have I been doing with Tom? Let go when I'm leaving, fantasy and absence. It could go to the Roy pattern of humiliation and sacrificial sincerity.
9th
My father starts to sing Ave Maria in a tune I think is the wrong one. I sing it in the beautiful tune I know, spin it out, float it. Our tunes just sometimes connect at one note, an unusual harmony.
11
I called back and said that when I feel out of touch I feel he doesn't care, then I feel I have to go away, then complete abandonment sets in. I hang by a thread. He said he's where he always was. He's mainly thinking ahead to when I leave, whether he can take another run at the wall. I have nothing to worry about except his getting on my nerves. I saying having him around doesn't get on my nerves very much but his absence gets on my nerves tremendously. Then my heart comes on - it's fluttering - I'm in love again - aching and excited - is this the right way to be? Maybe he really has quit drinking, smoking and doing dope. Maybe he really will move here. Maybe he really does want to be with me. Maybe we really do interest each other.
- Look at childhood, it says.
- Do you mean look at why I couldn't believe
- Do you mean those good things are all true
- Do you mean it is safe to believe
- Do you mean we have come through
- Do you mean I've plumbed the agony
- Now should I live as if I have come through
- Is this what I was withdrawn from YES
- Do you mean look at why I couldn't believe
12
Seeing sub specie aeternitatus - is that what it was when I saw Tom as the tall man against the sky?
A woman holding out crossed strands of her hair and playing the harp on them.
I come into my room and find my brown suitcase open, Trudy on the floor by the fireplace holding a sheet of Frank's letters to the fire. I don't know how much they have already burned.
Reading Yeats, Coleridge, Valéry - Whalley on all of them - these last weeks. Richards. What I'm looking for and finding in the theory is statement of my own sense of how certain kinds of knowing are done, from people more like me than philosophers are. Poetic talent that is interested in what it is that it knows, and how it knows. Coleridge is my boy - he's the one I am. Yeats is someone else entirely but he and Coleridge have me by landscape. Valéry is perfect epistemology. Richards is cognitive pre-science evolved from Coleridge. Whalley derives from Coleridge too. Yeats isn't epistemological but he tracks something, the subliminal power of landscape evoked.
I put them together under one hypothesis: that people intuit the structures and motions and materials of their own brains. Knowing that opens another two thousand years, I feel. I'm biting off my thumbnails saying that. What sort of age would it be - I saw a silver light. This is something to reach for: what would it be like to read through the whole of the dark ages of misunderstood metaphor in that way. Women, write! You have an eye in their blind spot. I mean me, but the thought, for instance, of getting up in a cog sci conference and speaking among the suits makes me shrink. And is that the way to influence, probably not. What is the way to do this? Keep locating allies. Make as much as I can of authority in another area.
I feel as if my days are very thin. At the same time I feel the weight (that isn't the word) of the range of what I do - the contexts I take in with what I read. And something about the bookwork - the way it is as if about what keeps coming back to me in itself, but it's built in a pocket so I don't remember it.
14th
So happy you're coming.
It's Monday. Who - who's coming.
15
Looked at his letters yesterday after months. He got clear for a couple of them and then clouded over.
The differences in how his photo looks to me. Today I'm apprehensive. What is it really. The face in the photo was so belligerent, the recessive side so withdrawn. I was saying, he drops me. He can't hold focus to keep hold of me. When I say that, tears come.
It says: that grief is the other side of a fantasy joy.
How many times do I have to go over this ground.
-
Evening. The new moon last night. I saw it from the road leaving Iona Park, as fine as a thread.
I'm in my workroom. Longing to work with beautiful material, passion. My heart is vibrating tightly, in confinement. Those beautiful images so inert. There's something I should be doing, I should be spilling - drunk - stoned - bursting - dissolving - diffusing. It's tight, tight.
16
Imagine this: if I had unlimited money what would I be doing. Move to the States. Small house in California. Electronics room. Technical help. I'd make Orphic hymns. Travel to talk to people. Would I finish the doc? Yes but elsewhere. I'd have a garden and a pool. A library. I'd throw out most of my stuff. Have an agent.
- My true work is in those materials not
exactly
- Is that love woman's realm YES
- It is true intuition NO
- It is thrilling to me YES
- Is my true work struggle against those materials YES
- It is the most intelligent I've been NO
- Will you give me a sentence about them they are a means of controlling heartbreak about loving men
- It is a land I built out of my love for men YES
- Erotic in the wrong way
- Does that include the video stuff
- This work is not inner lovers it is if you have a relation to it
- These materials are Euridice YES
- Will you give me a sentence about what the right relation is successful development of the work of high listening
- The basis for high listening is here
- Is high listening intuition NO, clairvoyance
- For instance listening to you NO, in the work
- Euridice is the means of high listening YES
- But she has to be opposed no, supported
- Will you give me a sentence about high listening if you come through shattering of the structure, you are not excluded
- High listening is an unusual ability no
- It is female maturity YES
- It is what I do in philosophy YES
- Is it seeing through YES
- Are you saying my work in philosophy is more important than my work in art no
- I can use these materials but I have to undress them YES
- I'm looking for an ability to think clearly
- This is a catalog of glamours? mm they are glamours because there is something in them
- I am trying to see through the tissue of fantasy YES
- I set up the materials and talk about them YES
- Is that inner lovers no
- Who is the other lover work
- Euridice is the feeling, Orpheus is the work yes
- Technical sense no, refinement
- I'm working to rebuild feeling YES
- Was last night's frustration endemic to the material YES
- Because it is a product of frustration YES
- To be honest in this work do I need to love a man in reality YES
- With instinct passion
- Will you comment that's what will make you intelligent
- This work is imaginary sex? imaginary passion
- It sets me up chemically as if I had it YES
- Do I need to live with a man
- Will you say more something about completion
- Of what betrayal
- Do you mean, that too? YES
- Completion of the illusion of betrayal YES
- How close am I to that as close as you are to the Work
- Do you mean it's ongoing NO
- Is that love woman's realm YES
17
Imagine this: a companion I could show this workbook to. Resolution to all edges of intuition. Resolution and action, completion. Living there. Centrally. No one? Jam. I have already had that companion and she was worth more than any I have had since.
The windows are silvered over, a vapor screen subtly marked. There is a paradise I find and forget. It isn't the only paradise. It's the one I am - this I.
21
Hello, it's Monday. It's a year later. We kept on. There were crossings. We despaired for hours but we didn't cut out. He was a man yesterday of such singularity I didn't know how to take him. This morning when he was in the bath I came in and sat on the floor and said I had been trying to understand what I was seeing and it is his power, the power he has been afraid of, that he thought people wouldn't be able to take - and also that he hasn't wanted to take responsibility for.
And what happened then: he got younger. He invited me - you invited me - to touch you. You let me see you. You came in my hand.
We argued. I resisted your program for a pleasant bike ride in Stanley Park. You insisted we should talk. You were too much for me two days in a row. You jumped into my bed this morning crying because you didn't want to go back. I'm trying to think how you were different - you were different. You weren't as sleazy. You struck me as stupid sometimes - loud - fishing for compliments all day, not giving them - imposing music - demanding your way. When you came you looked like a yahoo, baseball cap, fanny pack, sunglasses, white tennies, a chewing gum mindless look. This is no man for me, I thought, but I held your hand in the car. You came down out of a storm. You really did stop smoking. Quit dope and drinking in the place where it has been your way. You're using compulsive drive to exercise. This man is so loud and mindless, I was thinking, but I went on being fair, saying what I was.
It turned for both of us last night when I sat up straight and spoke to your demon. You put yourself in my hands and I was tracking resourcefully, gently and remourselessly. "How does the demon see the other?" He won't say. "How would you describe the relation of the demon and the other? It seems a standoff to me." "There is a lot of energy going into this standoff."
I showed you the two sides of your face when you were a child and now. "That is the origin of your demon." Then the demon spoke to me. The demon judges, assesses, is hateful, impatient, swift, observant, intolerant. "I have enjoyed being a dangerous man. It is a rush."
This morning it occurred to me to ask the book, What should we call the demon? Love woman, it said - creative energy. That surprised us both. Not the left side. What it means is that the woman in him was powerful, intelligent, the man oppressed and sad. "You saw me and said bingo," I said. "That's exactly what happened, too" you said.
We did amazingly well. The way it was ahead of me and too much for me but I kept going. It also occurred to me to ask what is the name of the other. It said it is the work. Human skill and creative instinctive energy, that's the marriage, it said. "I look at you and I'm thinking something like this: this is what happens to a little boy. He becomes something so spectacularly particular." The face I had in front of me was indescribable = wings of hair, long pointed eyes, wide line of mouth, big nose, big ears, rough, scarred, lined, a vivid old male - so far from female - so extreme - extreme the way a gargoyle is. I kept trying to get my bearings with it. I have never seen such a thing as this face. It is so unlike his self-description, self-concern. It's a face from another planet and I am making contact of whatever kind I can with a form of life so unlike mine. I'm marveling but I am also overwhelmed.
The smell of my pussy, my beautiful ass. "I love your fat." He kept stroking my belly pad.
Saturday night choosing clothes for him. We went through every possibility. I didn't hold my tongue. "No - not your jeans. I don't know how anyone can be so concerned with his clothes and have so little sense of what suits him." I was grumbling silently that he had bought new shoes and new jeans and I have a hundred dollar Sprint bill.
Jackson Brown, Dire Straits. Men who sing for him. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I listen with care and am moved by every touch and tendril. - Oh! He left me his poems. Why is it that day after day, until today, I sang again and again Najma's line Faithless love / Like a river flows. Listening to it with him was perfection in perfection. Today I was singing Jane's song over the wipers' beat, How do we get to / Be re - al. And his pink teeshirt.
Something I kept feeling: I sound off, I'm sounding social, things we're saying aren't real enough. Why. Is that sex? I want to say I was confident touching him, that was good. Shampoo in my hand. On the bikes we raced the last stretch.
Tony Gordon-Wilson. We were in his territory and he smelled us. He was there on his bike carrying a nine-foot bar of what looked like iron. I started to laugh. "You're doing Cervantes." Tom got huffy and I was annoyed with him for taking it so inflexibly. He had an agenda and Tony's performance was not in it. Tony wanted to play but he wanted to joust too, he could see Tom was being baited. He took the hint but he was angry. He rushed ahead in his tinpot World War I helmet, hurled his lance at the stop sign and hit it, but didn't count on the recoil. Flew over the handlebars and hit hard. "Slow down" I said to Tom. I wanted to give Tony time to get up before we passed him. Tom was checking through what this would mean if it were an omen. A furious fool tilting at stop signs. I was thinking it was Tom's mania for having the event turn out the way he plans it. "He's my friend" I said. "He's fuckin' crazy." "No question."
The film about Dinesen rubbed his raw side. "Those guys were wimps." A raccoon bit his finger at Prospect Point when he was petting its nose. Worst was when we went into two camera stores and I did the talking. He had his rap planned and I didn't even let him start. "But I am the filmmaker," I said. And so on. We were both offended. He said what he really thought about the film. I thought - let's get into this. But he had another plan. We'd go have a nice dinner in a restaurant. He'd treat me. But white food, none of this Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian shit and not Mr Mike's either, somewhere nice. I say sneering that I don't know any midrange white food restaurants because I never eat in them. White Spot. We walk there. It's closed down, a sheet of plywood over the door. Let's just go back to the car. Coming home through Chinatown I remember Mitzi's. He likes it. He has coffee. He's arguing. He wants me to fall into place and enjoy myself in his plan. I'm balking. I won't look at the menu. I won't order. He orders seafood fettucini. He's feeling better because he's sitting in a nice place spending money. I'm mainly still angry that I had to work so hard to get him here because - he said - he didn't have the money.
The moment Friday morning when I looked through my pile of things for him and gave him two letters I hadn't sent. Reading them with him and in an exhausted state, I said I saw a starved person having fantasies. Sometimes in your letters you talk to me as if I were some kind of Heathcliff figure you want me to be. I could see it was true. I cried. I said what I say at the moments of that revelation, that I want to feel but when I do feel I get it wrong, so I don't know what to do. I was bereft but quite gently so, because I have been there before. He said maybe I would see him as he is.
What was the other crossing. I said I felt foolish. I was simple in shame. It was when he felt guilty that I had drawn lines on a map. I cried. I said You don't have to do anything. He stroked my hair.
- I did my best could have done better
- If what if you had been willing to miss him
- Do you mean all along no, while he was here
- Instead of missing him I say I was mistaken YES
- I should say, I miss you, please come back to me YES
- I should have faith that he's my right companion? no, that your right companion is in him
- If what if you had been willing to miss him
22nd
Finish working this through so I can work. He's an old man. He lives a mindless life and it shows. His vehement mindlessness bores and tires me. He has or had a talent but he didn't have application. He wanted to have fun: which means he needed frenzy. He has fine lyric judgment. The songs he picks are complex, true and transcendent. He is floored by packing a bag. I come and repack for him in a minute. That aphasia is related to the way he can't decide what to wear. He's narrow at the temples, when he slicks his hair down and his eyes are bloodshot from shampoo he looks his worst, a knocked-out cur, a village drunk. At his best, what I think of as his best, when his hair is out sideways and he has his specs on and his mouth shows he's concentrating, he looks, I said, like an Irish playwright. But all this is no moment. He wrote short poems. He feels the death in people - he knows they are alive.
When I showed him the notes for bright and dark he cried a tear from his right eye. Why? You made art out of our time - not exactly that.
Thursday when he came down through a rainstorm I took him straight to Carnegie for supper. We came home. I showed him the La Glace book. Friday it was Hotel Vancouver, I thought I had a press conference. He sat in a room he liked. We drove around Stanley Park. Came back through the garden. Many ducks on the pond. We'd woken to a clear sky. What did we do Friday afternoon, came home and had a nap. He slept a long time. Oh yeah - Friday was when he whipped my pants off, one motion it seemed. Ate my beautiful pussy is what he calls it - perfectly clean, a beautiful smell, clear coral pink and pouty lips. Then wouldn't let me touch him. I understood. He was getting even from last time.
Lying next to him Thursday night I was achy, Friday night not at all. But I shouldn't have stayed all night in his bed because I woke very logy. He woke strong, happy, and in love. Was pushing and not taking hints. Wouldn't make me tea. Grabbed my ass when I wanted the small of my back rubbed. His voice was too loud. We went to the Dinesen movie. Her power, the dominated men, unnerved him. Then the story of the video camera which had been one of his hopes that fortune will go on proving she loves him by giving him something for nothing. He hadn't foreseen that the batteries were dead and the camera lacks a charger. $240. Second time he's hoped to give me something wonderful, all-exculpating, and it falls flat cos he didn't think it through. We came to terms, I admitted I hadn't considered that he had a history with the camera and wanted to have the adventure of Sony store self-presentation etc, and that that sort of fact often goes way over my head. I put my chin on my arm on the table like a dog asking to be forgiven. He said he understood I've probably had to fight all the way. We went home and had a nap. He slept a long time. I just dipped under.
Then there was the gala. I dressed him to look like my artist stud - chinos, the pink tee-shirt, my leather jacket. He was probably the best-dressed man in the room, he said. I looked nice myself but that wasn't at issue. I was jealous of all the attention he was requiring me to give him. Hey, I'm the girl here. And he had a fit that I ignored him for ten minutes talking to Eric Erickson about Film Board equipment. He didn't know I wasn't introducing him because I couldn't remember Eric's name. By the time we got to the ballroom we weren't on easy terms. My way in those things is to get a free meal and circle the edges. He hates circling the edges and wants to spend money when he eats. The band was loud and bad. We went downstairs and sat in the lobby.
That was Saturday. Sunday when I woke I was still stunned and overwhelmed. The Havana for breakfast. His face by now was too much for me so I invited him to sit on my side of the booth. A young black man in a baseball cap came in. I caught a flash. What was that about? What? The way that black guy looked at you. I saw his demon and he didn't like it. What's his demon? He's destructive, he hurts people and he doesn't care. (Something like that.) Interesting, I thought: it's recognition. It's erotic. Anger saw anger, there among the peaceable whites munching crepes.
Then on to the bike ride story. Tom kept describing people as nice people. I kept being surprised that he seemed to think of it as praise, or relevant in any way. Wanting us to be having a good time like the pleasant couples walking the seawall.
We came in from the cold and the last race home and walked into separate rooms. I was thinking, this is impossible, it's over. Alright, I'm willing. I don't know what's happening and I don't know how to go on, I can't figure it out. I don't like him. When I went into his room I found him sitting on the floor with his legs out straight in front of him. At the end of his rope. When he gets there I collect myself.
It was after that it came to me to ask to talk to his demon. I liked the demon. Right away I got interested. - Is it the way it has always been with my lovers, the nice person in them bores and stupefies me and I go hunting for trouble? His nice person drops the g's on his words the way Michael does too. I hear myself joining them in that tone, and then, though I'm humorous, I feel false and out of contact. When the demon says he hates that was when I was satisfied. Yes, that's what I need to hear. This is who I need to speak to. He hates lies and hypocrisy, he says. The world is dishonest. The world? I'm thinking. But there isn't time just then to follow that. I have to concentrate.
I know approximately that I'm supposed to find the opposition. "How do you see the other?" "He's empty." "What's he empty of?" "Power." "Now I want to talk to the other." "The demon just wants you to talk to him." "Demon I'll talk to you again, I just want to ask the other one a question. Do you think you are empty?" "No." "What are you full of?" "Light." "Demon, if you think the other is empty, and the other thinks he is full of light, it sounds like a standoff to me." I felt I was hearing gender opposition, religious training, his mum and dad.
"I want to show you something." The two sides of his face. He didn't want to believe there's an opposition visible in him - he didn't want that at all. I said don't worry, people only see it if they're looking for it and most of them don't want to know. I think the intervention that will matter most to him is seeing the original look of his imp side. He has feared he is possessed by an evil force. That was done to him. I said, "Demon, I believe in you. I'm on your side, I like you." When he saw the brightness, autonomy, ancestral sharpness of his child-imp set together with the sunny social availability of his mother's child, and then saw next to it the belligerence of his man-demon and the sadness and withdrawal of his love-self, he saw - I think - or will see eventually - the separating branches of a tree in which love and anger are one light which is his power.
-
On the phone, I thank him for his realness; he says it is a pleasure to be real with me because I am trustworthy. He says the light in San Diego is brassy with smoke, Fred secretly looks at the postcard of Voltaire I sent for him, and he was thinking of our bicycle race. He liked my spirit. He liked the way I was breathing. He liked - he did not say - that he could win generously, by staying just level with me. I liked, I didn't say, that I could push myself without holding back, and yet be in no danger of embarrassing him, by reason of my size, which nonetheless I don't think an important deficiency.
Where the body is so intuitive and so unconscious the ego has never functioned properly because in any threatening situation, the autonomic nervous system has said no and the ego has withdrawn. One cannot act with normal aggression, cannot respond to everyday challenges, and the ego cannot mature through normal interchange. If the individual lives close to the unconscious - a psychic or artist - then the body responses require acute observation and must be dealt with consciously. Otherwise, the isolated ego will seek some soporific to escape the unfocused dread. [Marion Woodman, The pregnant virgin, I think]
the golden west volume 8: 1996 september-october- work & days: a lifetime journal project