| london volume 6 part 4 - 1973 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Long conversation with Luke while he was in his sleeping bag last night. We looked at the book about mammals - there was a drawing of primate hands, with the bones drawn. I showed Luke how to pinch his finger to feel the bone, pinch mine as well, told him he had bones all over inside him. He said "It's very nice to have bones." "It is nice, because it makes you strong." "An' I like your face." "My face? Why do you like my face?" I'm astonished. "Because it's ve-ry beau-ti-ful" he says carefully. Flooded with love for him I want to tell him something very special, so I say "You know, when you were still inside me, before you came out, Roy and I said 'The baby in there is very nice, we want him to come out very much,' and then when you did come out we looked at you and we laughed and laughed because we were so happy that you had come out!" Luke's face crumpled itself and he said "I am ve-ry sad." "Why are you very sad." "Because I don't want to go in your tummy again." Later I said "Luke why are you so wonderful?" Luke slapped his chest, "Be-cause I AM!" "Oh yes, that's exactly why, because you are Luke Chisholm!" Zactly. He insists that sometimes babies come out of daddies' tummies as well. - My new [super 8] film of the two faces, it's very tactile in the way it treats the edges of things and goes near them, brushes them out and into focus, pulsates them. On another level it is playing with the something that connects the two faces, their looks: softness and knowledge. Something about sex in those hands and the bellybutton, she's ageless. Another level the tiger's eye that lurks in or just off the frames, faces, what difference does it make that it's there some of the time and then not again. The torn edge of it on their faces and it fits so well. Belly button and eyes. Table, edge of photograph, water spots. [notebook] Songs - the Humperdinck song from Hansel and Gretel -
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- [notes on making kites] Breeze shouldn't be strong enough to bend tops of trees. Back to wind - hold by towing ring at arm's length - wind should simply lift it up - should never throw it - hold it tilted into wind. Hill - 50' on the windward side, not at the top. - [notes on vitamins] - our work may be described as the gradual unfolding and cultivation of sensibility, or greater range and delicacy in feeling, which bring about concurrently the awakening and freeing of our innate energies. This we practice through the activity of sensing. McLure in Roszack anthology Gidal: old art - hierarchy of sensibility - find, arouse, cathart, areas of psychic tension - metaphors for yr identifications - perceptual models, voyeurism New art - watch oneself watching - force awareness of how it's made - ie decipher structure precisely. To be life enhancing, visible things must be presented in a way to make us feel we are perceiving them more quickly, grasping them more deeply than we do ordinarily. Berenson Because of the inwardness of our life-processes, we do not know, or rather, cannot tell, how or why we live, even though it is our own inmost selves which are doing the living .... We have learned to identify ourselves only with the narrow and superficial area of the conscious and voluntary. Roszak anthology Puritanism, stoicism, fear of self. Ie Gidal etc identifies the person with the conscious and voluntary. To be moved is labour as much as to be brought to have a thought. To be led into catharsis, to be led into analysis, in both cases you're being shaped by the shape of an object, in both cases you are 'identifying' I think. Rat's rapture centre is in midbrain, not cortex. C/f trance state - confidence, total recall, synthesis of material, clairvoyance, telepathy. The unconscious which "shades smoothly at some point into that organization of energy we call matter." [notes on possible films] - [list of happiest moments for an exercise at the Khanka] 1. After Luke was born, long ward, 20 beds, everyone sleeping, 2-5 a.m., pigeons, on fire with joy. 2. Anna Karenina, tea, pile of buttered toast, alone, white misty October, my first room in London, roses on everything, 3 or 4 different carpets, mornings, one or two chapters. 3. Mafalda, my best friend more beautiful than she'd ever been, her man, house, sea, eucalyptus, morning glory tangled with nasturtiums, eat together, cook for each other, lying in the sun without clothes, waiting for her child to be born. 4. On the train to Oxford after a hard night, quarrel with a man, realized everything I saw was gleaming, I was wide awake to everything, loved everything, everyone in the carriage made me smile, lasted for all of the journey. 5. Montreal - sitting on the balcony of a slim house that looked backwards over all the city, hot day, thundershower, wine and watermelon, dark, rain streets turned black and shining - the light came from the far side, grew and grew and we all thought it was the end of the world 6. Falling in love with somebody in the presence of two best friends, January - March, colors, jumping up and down make the red sun leap in and out of the tips of trees. 7. Seventeen, climbing a spruce tree early in the morning, seeing cobwebs laid like nets all around and below, seeing Mount Baker shining snow - bursting full of my future.
[journal] Elias' face at the Khanka, Elias' radiant face, I don't know a face as perfect, he's God the father, smiling Jove; his countenance shines on me, brown eyes, nothing false, nothing bent, everything beams from the centre of his head, beautiful Elias, where does he get that face, who fed him through his childhood? He and Christina whispering and kissing through this weekend, telling each other in our presence, "Your nipple, my tongue, tasting, feels it rise." He says it smiling. He can say anything, from his boundless self confidence, and it holds us, makes us laugh. Christina says "Every day with Elias." How I resent him! Oh how I resent his generosity that smiles on me if I happen to stand in the way. His clarity. Since they were eighteen, he and Christina. Twelve years ago; now Hannah and the little new boy in her. [Later: Girl, Aura] Some days I look like that but I can't sustain it. He came smiling around the corner at me. I was wiped out, obliterated, by his physical light. He's a little sentimental. In his writing for himself he's simple, proud, a little vain, seeking to be good, like a child. He's so clear, his face is transparent to the light - perhaps he doesn't deserve. The right things happen to the happy man, everything comes to him. Last night our meditation was sincerity. We were to say "Oh god, give me light." Malik beside me. We were to say it in whatever way we found. Elias began with his voice a little strained. Malik. My sincerity was silence, sometimes "Oh god give me Elias," then "oh god give him light," them light, give Malik light, threshing beside me, give Elias light bent forward palms spread forehead. My prayer was just to cry a little, sometimes "Make me light, make me light, make me light" in a whisper. On Saturday night we passed the candle around and told the happiest moments in our life, passed the candle around to make a spotlight for the speaker. Hafisa's story: When I was about nine years old I began to have violin lessons. My teacher happened to be a wonderful man and I loved him very much. We went sometimes together to museums and such. One time we went to the castle, and the man there talked to my teacher about his daughter; that was me. And my teacher didn't say anything. It made me so happy. I wanted to cry but I didn't dare. Bazin's gift for storytelling. The day he noticed the clouds had begun to move. His mother's cake when it wasn't Christmas. Running home after the 11 plus. Getting the elegant solution to a mathematical problem. Nearly everyone original and keen. Elias a little literary, Christina a little chatty. Oh I was sharp to a point, told my six stories as if they were secrets, which they were. I was funny, I was concentrated inside my circle of light and when the row of faces out there laughed - they came from far away, outside a trance. I told the moment in the spruce trees, Montreal, Anna Karenina, the train to Oxford, jumping in that meadow, and Luke's birth. - Dreamed a little room in an empty house. Bed, not much else. I was squatting and had to leave. - Weil: The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluable problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting. Not without any hope. There is not entry into the transcendent / until the human faculties / intelligence, will, human love / have come up against a limit / and the human being waits at this threshold / which he can make no move to cross / without turning away / and without knowing what he wants / in fixed, unwavering attention. Brings me next to Carmichael again. Simone Weil First and Last Notebooks Oxford - On the Thames - shivering bead curtain of lights, leap through it, catch my hands on strands of - swing round so I land lightly, on my feet, on a grassy hillside. Above is a dark sky with stars, lit all round the circumference as if by moons about to rise. Around, a dark wool of trees, but no lights. The air is warm and fresh. I lie down without cover or pillow and close into soft unbroken sleep, for a long time, can feel the hill gently turning, traveling, faintly vibrating. Dream that the sky opens along a seam just nine feet above my body and drops through another person. Dream a light effervescence through my body, sparkle like lights moving from cell to cell. Père Castel 1728 if one took away the Earth's gravity one would take away light at the same time. For indeed, light and sound and all other qualities perceptible to our senses proceed from and are, as it were, a result of the mechanical structure, and consequently the gravity of natural bodies which are luminous and sonorous in proportion to their degree of gravity and buoyancy. Transformations eg of lead to gold are possible but with tremendous release of energy maybe cataclysmic. Atomic fission. Real aim of alchemy is the transformation of the alchemist. The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force'. This field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the universe. From this position he has access to realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call 'The Great Work'. The Ethiopian film, sharing with Rick the Coke tin whose sympathetic vibration put music into our hands. My own research on sympathetic vibration. Diamonds are sensitive to nuclear and cosmic radiation. Alchemist makes new elements and what's left in the crucible is universal solvent, elixir of life. Old age due to 'heavy water' accumulating. Substances that eliminate it exist in evaporated water. Saunas? "Alchemical copper, alchemical silver, alchemical gold" have different properties. He establishes a new relationship between his own mind, which from now on is illuminated, and the universal Mind eternally deepening its concentration. Could it be that certain radiations from the 'projection powder' bring about the transmutation of the psyche? not an idealist ... militates against our limited realism: we reject reality when it is fantastic. Cup marks on mountains all over the world. Knowledge is ignorance accompanied by derision. What does it mean, that we have so much time and so little? Photographs taken on the plain of Nazka remind one irresistibly of the ground-lighting of an airfield. If we store our family history in our chromosomes then family is .... Swift, in The Journey to Laputa, gives the distances and periods of rotation of the two satellites of Mars, ... when the American astronomer, Asaph Hall, discovered them in 1877 and noticed that his calculations corresponded to Swift's indications, he was seized with a sort of panic and named them Phobos and Demos: Fear and Terror. Wales: Caeleon-upon-Usk where the knights left to look for the Grail. Arthur Machen - angels fighting at the Battle of Mons. The hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats. Jesus restoring withered limbs. La Paz museum gigantic statues of a radiant giant. National Geographic magazine 1925 astronomical map. Atlantis - Tia Huanaco in the Andes, also New Guinea, Mexico, Abyssinia and Tibet Flossie: the star What's the Zohar? Thought transference requires 'resonance' of two people, one is sender, one receiver, chosen by electroencephalographic record. Impossible consciously to tell whether message is received. Possibly same with healer-patient. Lovers. Suggests that some of the unknown capacities we have are like an analogue computer: you make a model and internalize it and then know about the thing modeled - above is like below. Possibly the function of images, symbols, what they're for is really to give us knowledge, if we're in a state to catch it. Symbol is a model. "The spiral is perhaps the 'model' of the profound structure of all forms of evolution." (energy, life, consciousness) The way I have a steering mechanism that tells me "This is important". The awakened state. JBS Haldane Physiology of awakening differs from that of sleep - tea task of Zen [other notebook] [notes on Co-op program - Hammond and Mike] Co-op warm, little family group, most of the people whose photographs are in the film, the three girls in dressing up clothes leaning together like kittens. Simon, Gill, Peter, Mike, Maria - [notes from Mike's class, first experiment with 16mm Bell and Howell] - Sitney: Two persistent concepts have stalked the history of this genre in America through all its forms. One is the pursuit of a form that would be the image of consciousness, and the other is the idea of abstraction. 1. psychodramatic trance film - Deren, Brakhage, Anger, from oneiric cinema of the 20s 2. lyrical cinema - Menken, Brakhage 3. goes into art of vision 4. even more structural Ernie Gehr about Serene Velocity: A desire less to express myself and more of making something out of the film material itself relevant to film for spiritual purposes. The intention is to be able to savor and examine the film composition. Not simply 'exposing' it to show how it's done, but to have it savored and examined with the same intensity as the recorded image .... What I mean by 'spiritual' is sensitizing the mind to its own consciousness by allowing the mind simply to observe and digest the material, film phenomena presented, rather than manipulating it to evoke moods and sentiment. These structuralists are all delighted with the consciousness metaphor as well! People "when they look somewhere, they see an object, and they react to this seeing internally. The film's doing the same thing. It is reacting internally ... in a way, the film, with its properties, is active, like the nervous system." - 25 October The few days since coming back from Notting Hill - my house startles me, corners catch me, I stop with my hand on the door knob staring at a display of light - the piano, the windowsill in the bedroom. The green confusion of geranium leaves and cyclamen in the corner. From the toilet, blue and green clouded floor, the red chair set in the middle of it, and the yellow door opening onto it. The window at Tony's. Fighting with Roy. Making brief arrangements with Tim Horricks and passing them on to Joe. Lesley ringing and asking how I feel about Women's Liberation. Joe and Godard put into the same bed, by me as hostess, last night. Luke coming home. I was shy and false because of the trouble with Roy. The story about a little boy "Called LUKE!" Singing him to sleep with a glittering version of O Holy Night. He yawns. Lets go the grapefruit sections. Closes his eyes. Rough breath through his cold. I dream of the warehouse space. Tony makes me smile. The drawings rippling out of me, my animated film, delight of making little person fly through the still starry night, asleep and awake. As Luke goes to sleep he talks about Roy's house, my house, the Sufi farm: he's getting them straight, Roy's house has a big bath, mine has a little bath, the Sufi farm has a big one, all of them have toilets - he's mapping out places. We talk about grandmothers, I tell him he has one called Mary who is crazy about him, he calls her his Sufi grandmother. Yes. Wales and the tent, the little boy called Roy and the tractor he got for his birthday. I begin to worry about him going away from me for half his time, find myself grieving about Roy, the announcement, explanation I'm making someone goes "I thought I'd found someone I could talk to." The tender somebody who comes alive again in this place. Talking to itself. Saying grace, lifting my hands, felt myself praising - forward. States. - [semiotics notes] "Somehow one has to take one's examples with a pinch of salt rather than let them undermine the project," Mark. "The point of semiology is to examine the meaning-making process." "Doesn't that imply that you know what the meaning is?" The sense of discouragement, confusion, fear, self mistrust that these seminars evoke. - Dreams. Wednesday morning, last of October. A little boy I'm responsible for, I recall it's been there for three days without moving, decide to take it in, it's a rubbery being wet from the rain, with a long neck and little head, like my drawings! Clear a space for it on the floor, it seems intelligent. The place was important but I can't remember it. / Last night talked to Catherine about Luke being intelligent. Look down at my leg, see what looks like a thick varicose vein, which begins to move and emerges as an earthworm, another worm comes out of another part, I wonder if I'm so ill, toxic, that they have to leave suddenly; a lot of flies, wasps, are attracted to me. / Looked at bruises on my leg last night. An old man has died, I'm going to his funeral with a friend, I'm gay and realize I'm too gay - there is something about socks and children not being at school - we have presents, to give or just gotten, I'm not sure - there is a toilet in the cemetery, when we go in to shit we have to crank up the number of the grave we're on the way to. I hesitate, people don't know the number or how to crank it up - somebody says it's 217 but there are no shafts that deep. I realize that we're meant to send our shit to the dead man's grave because it's part of his body - I wonder if I'd still have to if I hadn't eaten that chopped liver sandwich - anyway the question is solved, someone explains I must send it to the little dry box where it will be collected - image of a basement room with a metal table where the man has a big soft bag of shit collected to be cremated. I look on the toilet door at the names of those being buried that day - somebody says it's Joe Comerford - I say how strange he has the same name. There's more in this dream, conversations with various old men about funerals in France, etc. [In Valhalla Centre in 1978 I cremate my shit in the heater because there's no outhouse.] While recalling first dream, which was the earliest, had glimpses deeper into earlier dreams that I couldn't get, about cars - somebody driving what was like a refrigerator, that parked in the kitchen at night - three people seated comfortably and something earlier, about the inside of a car - I can't get it but it reminds me of last night's dream about a cabin, a fishing boat with Paul, water and a water journey, starry sea creatures. Judy was there too, and others. - Thursday dream. A film, seeing it I think what a brilliant film, who made it? Woke and remembered with pleasure that I made it. It was a suspenseful story of a train journey away in the mountains, like Transylvania, and the replies are ominous, a young man following as the train moves away to say that it's in such and such a place "if you can find it" - fluent contrasty black and white. Later arrive, something frightens me, I rush into the dark living room of a cottage, call out, a wheelchair emerges dimly from the room in the back. There is another section, a delicate tactful sort of waltz with a young man I don't know, wish I could remember both these films (sic) better, they were powerful and interesting. While writing this I've remembered something from the first evening I had supper at Joe's house. He came to sit on the chair next to me. When passing or reaching for something - the table was dimly lit by an orange light - we looked at each other's eyes and I was as if kicked in the stomach. Something must have been accidentally standing open, because I looked at him again to see if it would happen again, and when I did there was nothing, just a look. I'm missing him, yesterday and today. I'm listening for the telephone. Rings, stops when I reach it. Rings, Jane's dentist. Rings, operator with a call from - Joe. We don't manage to make much contact, information about his screenings, half invites me to The Devils which I don't much want to see, then get cut off and I call him back but can't get through, call him get a crossed line, wait for him to call me, call him get a busy line five times over, call him and it rings sixteen times, nobody's there, wait for him to call me, come upstairs and am still waiting. Sad. Since last night a bitter taste on the back of my tongue which intensifies in any other taste I put into my mouth, tastes like dying, maybe it's there for the rest of my life. Smell of John's sweater cuff weakening me. Poets feed me. - Dream I go to church, it's like home but seems to be open air, I'm wearing these green tights. The men are asked to leave to sing in another place, service goes on. I put my head down on the bench in front of me, very loose and childish but conscious of my thighs in the tights. There's a ruckus, people call out to me, Peter is sitting behind me and feeling up my bottom, I tuck something, a petticoat, over it in irritation and shout back at the people who're heckling. Donnie Toews or someone like him calls out "But we're all conscious that you're there, the whole time." "I'm conscious you're there too, but I don't make rhetoric out of it." More about seeing crowds gathered around where the men are. Another dream about a room, a big bed for Judy, baby beds in the corner. The important thing was the space. And another - Joe came to see me in the living room of the West Place house. When he was sitting on the floor I put my arms around him from behind, held his head back and that was nice. A gang of his friends, Africans, came. I was flirtatious and gay, but whenever I flirted with Joe he seemed to turn into a little spectacled middle-aged man, like the 'lawyer' hitching back from Ireland. Eventually his friends left in a hurry and he got taken off by a scruffy blond girl who seemed determined to have him. Tall. Not pretty, spectacles, rough dishwater short blond hair, Afghan coat white and dirty. [other notebook] [notes on another super-8 film] Luke in the morning says "I want a huggle." Luke holding Jane for a long time when she said she needed a cuddle. I was jealous. [ethnographic museum sketches] Peter's friend Neil telling me about a time when he'd had an accident and been in a coma for two weeks. Three months later, still hyper, he was crossing a street and said to himself, my brother's just had a car accident. "When I got to the other side I said 'Oh, it's alright,' and looked at the time." #2. "I dreamed I was in an unknown area trying to flag down cars. The next day my brother and I were driving in an area new to me, we side-swiped somebody and I went ahead and flagged someone down - I knew ahead of time what car would come and stop." - Joe says he was sleeping in his room next to Roger's, which has thin walls. Next morning they say "Who was in your room last night?" They'd heard an argument. Whose voice was it? Caroline's. She was in her bed down the street. He said to them "I'm not surprised." - I dreamed an institute of studies, where Joe was going to be doing his research. Standing next to him I put my knee along his and waited quite breathlessly for the gradual very slow turning that let me at last put my face against his shoulder - a sweater that smelled wonderfully of - some kind of flower I wish I could remember, the smell was beautiful - as I stroked his side from armpit to waist and found it lovely, a lovely indentation and slope at the waist, makes me sad to remember. I told him about the dream in which he turned to a middle-aged man whenever I flirted with him, he said "That strikes a chord in me." "What kind of chord?" "I can't say, it's from somewhere far back." And at that he had to leave. Moment at Burghley Road when he at one end of the room looking at a book, I at the other facing the window, I took off my shirt to change and watched him in the reflection not watching me. It's a shame if he really didn't because my waist looked nice going into those black trousers. Film with a quick glance. - Listening to the Messiah, watching a boy soprano puts tears in my eyes and that brings me to think of Roy saying to me even that first weekend "You know I'm more and more in love with Olivia," said so that I could take it lightly. When she told him about her abortion his eyes filled with tears and he said "I want to give you another baby." And I almost forgot, lying in bed next to Don, feeling with kindly embarrassment his hard-on along my thigh. I gave him up completely for Roy, who didn't .... Music - Khan - Pay attention to voice - Vibration - body as resonator - Making circles to get clear ideas - Use music to unfreeze - Sound prints - Sound falls and impresses all objects, leaves an impression for some time - Charges it with a certain magnetism - Use of drums for fire walking, does the rate of vibration make it possible? - Singing practice increases magnetism - Idea of the unique natural voice not to be lost in training "Craving for colors and sounds" [undated journal]
Last night while saying my mantram in front of the fire, several things came to me, leaked into my mind between the words. One was a decision about cutting the paper film, the other was the knowledge - it was brought in by something someone said about Rilke reconstructing a childhood for himself because the childhood he'd had was no childhood for a poet - that I must call up the little girl I was, be her new friend, father maybe, why not; I began to speak to her very gently, small black-haired girl, told her she could come out now, now it's safe, now it's necessary. Called her, "Come out little child, come out now," come out of that cave, come out of your obscurity. You burned so bright and secretly in there. I wondered how many people have used their books to redeem their childself. I understood I must do it and have tried to do it several times without knowing what I was doing. Now I only need to decide how. It's a work. Before I can be as Elias is, I must have a right childhood; and it was almost right but no one recognized me in it - it was an underground childhood. When I came to write this - there were the two lines from Neruda [Paz] already planted from yesterday when I didn't know who they were meant for. I need some kind of trance technique to reach her. Something else that came in last night, a clue about the poem for the barn, as it is now, ribs open - I love it because its structure is open, peaks into everything around it. It is a strong shape but everything flows into and out of it. - Jean-Luc saying "When I was in one of my recurring visions about being a dove ..." and "Once there were a lot of doves, and then there was just one, that wrapped itself around the world and became a ...." The way his fingers splay up from the first joint when he presses the wood down. Luke saying as we went through the estate [Council housing] when the dark had fallen. "It's bright an' dark." We stood on the bridge for a long time because someone has wrenched two boards off the siding - dangerous above the tracks - Luke talking - I said "Feel my cheek, it's cold too" and he took both hands out of his pockets and felt my face up and down like feeling a carpet - kneeling beside him on the bridge I thought of taking him to Maureen's two years ago before he was one, thought about needing to have snaps of him to be able to remember the original moments between us as they happen. He walks about with the red hood over his head, the duffle coat buttoned tight around him and both hands stuffed into his little pockets along with a car and a Kleenex. He looks compressed like a wooden doll, bullet shaped, runs awkwardly down the hill but thinks he's very fast. Colin whiskery and tired looking last night, Luke entertaining him crawled under my skirt and curled up in the fetal shape, head next to my right knee. When he burst out he threw up his arms and said "It's a boy!" Colin was full of affection and left me feeling foolish but happy and befriended. What Anne said about sibling rivalry, do we all need to be only children? To confront: without anxiety. Alpert, Leary etc experimenting together. Psylocybin. When these people report their conversions from belief in the outside I feel like I'm at least halfway there ever since childhood but can't get past that halfway because it's sad, unconfident, and listless, resentful. Got to look for ways, test them out, be excited at least in first half. He had just sort of wiped out my whole game. That was it - that was my whole trip - emotions and past experiences and future plans. He was so high. R also stuck halfway. The guru who knew his thoughts: once you realize that God knows everything, you're free. Get up early, have a bath out of a pail, breathing exercises, pranayam and hatha yoga, meditate, study - before 11:30. Karma - unfulfilled commitments. When I'm physically revolted by somebody I'm saying no no NO I will not be them. Class of food. The spinal bones chakra butterflies. If being born was so hard why do we want to be born again? It must have been lovely. What I love - physical beauty. Austerities - silence. Sleeping - to have more clarity in the transitions into sleep. Actually what we refer to as 'dreams' are merely experiences which we are having on planes other than the physical plane. Such experiences are going on all the time, but usually our awareness is attached to the physical plane and we are oblivious to any other information coming from these other planes. P16 of Cookbook in Be Here Now. Mantra - witness. - Sadhana - spiritual work. 1. austerities - sleep, eating - "vibrations of the person preparing the food enter into food cooked over fire" - consecrate it. 2. study 3. asanas - positions, points of rest - watch 4. mantras - to break your identification with your own thoughts is freedom - energy - all one = light = consciousness - a most stirring poem - my separate being is a sort of conduit through which energy passes - plants are conduits which step down high vibrational form of sunlight - loss of old desires leads to feeling of emptiness - the middle way of being in the world 5. sex - total truth and total trust - nothing held back - fantasies - meditation 6. satsang, community of seekers - run old attachments through the machine to unattach them, especially parents 7. telling the truth - offensive talk about purification 8. here and now games 9. psychedelics Strongly learned oral habits 'Astral plane' In and out cycles Set up a clear movement through time Go through your death and your last party Yoga of naming [notes on wood burning kilns, raku, prospecting for clay, list of glazes used on pots, sketches of pots seen in museums] Among the dreams in Tony's bed: I'm in the clouds surrounding the earth - not 'up' but sideways with the earth's curved surface to the side, the clouds are like sheets of latex that toss me gently as waves, one of them sinks so far 'down' ('up'), ie 'out,' that I fear I'll lose contact with the earth and not be able to get back to it. Another nervous dream about the Khanka, people are complaining that I don't contribute enough. They (women) come to me with trick questions that I answer truthfully - tell them that if they make such trivial examinations they'll get trivial people.
November, Monday [letter] I have your week-ago Sunday letter in front of me. Your soft snowy Sunday night. Last night as I took the bus downtown to see a (Canadian) film (Mon Oncle Antoine) it was that wet cold dark here - not snowy, but silvery with twilight and hard rain - I remember passing the end of the broad paved walk that runs deep into Hyde Park, seeing black shapes running the length of the mirror surface of the path to get out of the rain, a man with a child on his shoulders, black masses of trees on either side, and the path narrowing to a point at its far end - very mythical-image. My film - you call it a thought-child and that's exactly what it is, but in a different sense completely from my usual thought-creatures, which are words. In this film I'm working with thoughts that are only very partially named - light, its presence and absence; color, its exact unnamable qualities, mass, movement, minute changes in all these; sound and its absence, reflections and their absence, forms of forms. O you can tell how much I love this film. I go into the swimming pool's room and sit up on the spectator's balcony, camera and notebook. Sit and expose myself very quietly to the moments that arrive: the sun comes out and makes a rosy smudge on the skylight - reflection of a chimney. A white-skinned boy in pumpkin-orange trunks swims tirelessly back and forth across the blue pool. My lens clouds over because the room is warm and the camera is still cold. The sun disappears and a rich pool of reflection vanishes in a second. Through the one missing pane of glass in the skylight, white clouds and deep blue sky run side by side. A bird has come in. A fat little black girl with yellow plastic bracelets sits for half an hour with her feet in the water; she never goes in. Two slim children stand motionless under the warm shower, falling into the postures of resting ballerinas. The sun flashes through again and writes neon hieroglyphics on the water. The tiled bottom of the pool writhes and flashes. I follow my own thoughts about how to be faithful to all this, not tricky, not stupid, not conventional. It makes me so high and happy. Thanks for Judy's letter. She seemed depressed to me; the letter was so abstract and impersonal. Our hippy friend has gone so straight. Hope it's right for her. [journal] Cien Anos de Solidad, Aureliano: He had wept in his mother's womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head from side to side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of the people with a fearless curiosity. Then, indifferent to those who came close to look at him, he kept his attention concentrated on the palm roof - John called two nights ago full of sighs, depleted. Joe is here, since several days ago. Is that why I longed for him yesterday? Warmth cut off and isolated, I can't rush to him. Tonight so full of loneliness and tenderness for anybody. Tony gone to Norway, not telephoning to say goodbye. I dreamed last night, remembered more than dreamed, a time when I was tormented by envy of Roy's aristocracy, felt lumpen and unworthy, anguished, invisible: in my dream as often happens I told him my dream and he said "That's because ..." but I've forgotten what it was he said. Luke is away and I miss him so much these nights when I go to bed. He is my real love I'm afraid. I look at his little body and think how perfect, rapid, gay it is. His spine, his flattening abdomen, his shape of a plump little man-hipped boy. These days I'm plump and haggard. The reflection in the cold big mirror in Oakhill House, fat bum scrubbing steps, angry dull face, fat under my chin this morning with the flabbiness of this period. This is so much like being twelve or eighteen, despair about my body, helpless tenderness, longing, rage, the mediocrity and compromise I despise in Alex the 'poet' and even Anastasia saying to poor blind and deaf Charles "Will you do that, honey, I'm not very good at such things" and I lunge to do it before he can. To walk away on one side of the scene, a small fierce girl hungry to be part of it, but knowing she never would be, above all because the heart that had been put to pump away all her life under her ribs was not only critical and intransigent, but one which longed so bitterly to melt into loving acceptance. An uncomfortable combination, as she knew even then. As for the stories like these when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating and I recognize it; it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal. [notebook] [notes on Joe Comerford's Emtigon] Eric Mellon - potter - thin man, greasy hair, full of jokes, astonishing his mermaid, "She's just slooped out of the sea," does his daughter's drawings. "The subject is the public's problem, they can have any subject they like. Skill in decoration is what the craftsman is after." Glaze - network formers and network modifiers, makes the chemistry of it astonishing and funny. Waving bowls he says to Hattori, "You can't really see anything from there, it isn't fair." FeO, Co and Cu (always mixes them) under pear, elm, beech, ash glaze. Elementary design, because we read [sketch top to bottom left to right] he puts things in that try to pull you in the other direction. Doesn't turn at all, throws his feet up. Picasso-like drawings, areas and lines, he described the languages of decoration and his as well. Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman
We fall for people who're doing things because they haven't got the screen of their stare blanking them out - conversation as lame duck contortions. - In Don't Look Now just the charm of the couple, married but as if lovers, lovers with all time, intercut their fucking with how they dress carefully afterwards, satisfied with themselves. - How scruffy and lonely I was leaving it, lank hair ragged jacket and a long rip in my jeans' bum, a hobo lady with worn face. - Let me be both this lonely hobo and the ingenuous girl somebody loves, is it possible, let me go into the baths tomorrow centred and quiet and wide open, let me have courage, let me be present to my friends to sense what's there, let Luke still want me, let me learn to be a camerawoman! [other notebook] Writing when it's smaller - good sign? - Lipton - use camera like a torch. Anastasia's film and mine. Charm of the wandering innocent eye she has, doesn't land on anything, a floating ghost with blinkered vision like a torch, an eye like a torch lighting bits of the conjectured space - full of mysteries, things half seen, the children, the bars of sunlight over a person's back, the big-bosomed woman pushing through (she always stopped when I turned to smile at her, but never in time, perfect tension). The yellow film. My film, with the false takes taken out, is just an introduction that has spots, flashes, my face upside down, then cuts to sequence of three nice drifting pans up the door and across the ceiling, a little different each time, marvels of reflections, lamps and windows. Then cuts to a lengthwise pan of the lights, another lengthwise but going a different way, and then back to crosswise, but facing the other direction, then black leader. Mike's hard hug through my thin pink teeshirt. Next time I go - take a blue and green and yellow filter. [notes on a super-8 film]
- Teillard "la chimie secrète de la psyche humaine, comparée par Jung au processus psychique qui se fait en l'alchimiste." "Jung a demontré l'existence d'un processus évolutif classique, particulier à la femme." Evans-Wentz - Tibetan yoga and secret doctrines for yoga of dream state The REM state is a period of unique cortical excitation with a heightened firing of nerve cells in many brain regions and substantial increases in cerebral blood flow. ... among the most extraordinary intense activations yet discovered in the normal functioning of the central nervous system. Although similar in many respects to highly aroused waking, there are good reasons for thinking that the functional organization of central nervous activity is quite different from waking, and that the stimulus which originates in this activation is intrinsic to the brain itself. - When we dream of a house we may presume that we are dreaming of ourselves ... the house is our social, family and intimate life in so far as it is rooted in the past and in the group ... therefore opposed to whatever in the dream may represent us as an a-social or anti-social, nomadic or deracinated individual. De Becker The Understanding of Dreams
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