| london volume 6 part 5 - 1973 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[notebook] She had learned that if she walked long enough, slept slightly enough to be conscious of her dreams, ate at random, was struck by new experience throughout the day, then her whole self cleared, lightened, she became alive and light and aware. "After all, it's always there, hatred is simply part of the world, like one of the colors of the rainbow. You can go into it as if it were a place." Sex was the slow business of building up, hour after hour, from the moment of meeting a woman he was to make love with - a power, a force, which when held and controlled, took both up and over and away from any ordinary consciousness into an area where words could be of no use. "If you're with a woman and you're holding some thought back, then it breaks the contact. That's why you keep going away from me." "When you get to a new place in yourself, when you're going to break into something new, then it sometimes is presented to you like that, giggling and tears and hysteria." She knew very well this area of the human mind where the machinery of ordinary life seemed more than absurd, seemed a frightening trap .... Her mind seemed to be a thin light texture through which other textures, feelings, sensations kept passing ... she had felt this as a tiny child, looking at grownup people talking and smiling to each other with put-on false smiles and looks .... They were afraid of each other, or at least had to placate each other: the small child had called the activity 'lies'. She had watched and judged these giants as cowards and liars, engaged in meaningless activities ... their fear of each other, their wariness, was so great that two of them could not meet without going stiffly on guard and stretching their mouths and making movements which said: "I won't hurt you if you won't hurt me - look, I'm so nice and kind, don't hurt me... . Martha had seen all this, understood it, had even said to herself in an anguish of fear that she would be swallowed up: Don't let yourself be sucked in, remember, remember - but she had not remembered, she had been sucked in, she had become a liar and coward like the rest. Remember, don't let yourself go to sleep; and if you go on always, testing the walls for weakness, for a thin place, one day, you will simply step outside, free. It will be as if the walls, in that one place, have crumpled and gone. And the room will seem like a horrible little cell that an animal has fouled. ... made Martha hold on to that prime thing she had learned in her life, had had to learn over and over again, so that she knew it as one does know things that have become part of one's substance, to be acted on because the knowledge is oneself: it was that if she was feeling something, in the particular [?], with the authenticity, the irresistibility of the growing point, then she was not alone, others were feeling the same, since the growing point was never, could never be, just Martha's ... if she experienced and was asking questions, others looked for her as she looked for them. [Lessing, The four-gated city I think] [undated journal] Today in this stalking irritability, I come back - in Lessing - to thinking about Joe. Simply that there are some things I wanted to learn with him, and he's cut me off, and I'm angry with him because he should have cared - he did, the way he smiled whenever he left me, and was still smiling when he had turned away to go to the tube. But has chosen to fold himself up in his obsession, out of fear of feeling for me I think, because there was sometimes real warmth between us. Don't know about any of that. Or was it me who was paralyzed when he said so curtly "That fil-lum will have to be done very well, if it's to be done at all." Listen Joe, I stalked off last Saturday night because I was raging angry. Was raging angry because you seemed to be telling me in one way or another that you had 1. closed down a channel that had been interesting for me and 2. that you had only ever had it open because I was a queer double to the obsession of your life. - Joe having just been here - love between us, he with his fine in-telligent face. [Inter-legere, gather, pick out, read. Inter - mutual or reciprocal action or relation, among, between. An intelligent: one in whom gathering and reading takes place between one thing and another? The world reads me and I read the world, the world gathers me and I gather the world.] Intell-ligent - reads and tells-in. Joe's intelligent and clear face, Joe's fine face, Joe's bright face. Today found myself singing "a little bit of heaven 'cause you're here" and - washed my face bravely, wore my black shirt. So declared to myself that he's somebody for me. Told him so, shyly, when he was opened a little by sitting in on me singing Luke to sleep. "Since I seem to have adopted you; as some kind of brother." "What I'm going back to," he's so faithful to somebody, "I guess I love this person. I feel it's important to her too." Oh you hatchet-faced Joe, you singular careful man, I like this crackling distance you keep, how you keep yourself clear. Fastidious, yes, you're too fastidious, you're an old woman but you put me on my mettle and you put such interesting thoughts into my head. You're neurotic tight repressed but what warmth in your hatchetface when you smile. Won't flirt will you, what kind of scruple is that. Asked him about the moment when I got the kick in my stomach, "very mysterious because it was so physical, so strong, so sudden and so without any obvious context. It was as if something had been left unlatched, or as if something had been left just slightly open, I couldn't tell where it came from, whether it was coming from you or whether it was me." He thought, " I think I know what it might have been, but I won't tell you now, because of what I'm going back to, but maybe I'll tell you the next time I see you." So that's all right now. A Saturday. November - Luke woke crying, couldn't comfort him, after a while he came and sat on me where I was sheltering in the wicker basket. "Why are you sitting here?" he said. "Because I'm thinking." "Are you thinking - on - me?" "Yes, I was wondering why you're so sad." "I'm sad because I need to go to Roy's house." Oh. After a while I was squatting near the back window and began to cry. He came quickly to stand next to me, but only looked, said nothing and didn't touch me. When I stopped and looked at him he hid his face and then turned it back with an embarrassed smile and jumped at me. "What did you do?" "I was crying." "Why?" "Because I'm sad." "Why are you sad." "Because I don't know what to do." "I don't know what to do either." Yesterday morning when he woke before me Luke was looking at the Countryside book and found the picture of an eagle tearing the entrails out of a fox. He woke me in distress. "What's he doing?" "The eagle is eating the fox." He was nearly crying, and shouted "The fox is not food!" He didn't have words for what he wanted to say, "It isn't funny! The fox wants his daddy. The fox doesn't want to be eaten." When I told Jane about it later, Luke said "I am not the fox." Attacked by misgivings today, feeling my limits, feeling stupid and false, very thin, not remembering anything seductive in myself, couldn't believe in my film, or my face, or my mind. Clearing chests and drawers. All the litter connected with Roy, stabbing me automatically, again and again, all day. Indra Kagis. Where are you? How are you? Longing to tell Luke about when he was a baby, how Roy slept next to us. Refused to. I'm sad these days, there's a bereft aloneness that makes me sob in Tony's bed. Can't imagine an alternative to my half-settled half-nomadic life. I'll never 'have' a man, won't have a family, and what will Luke choose? Scares me. Roy has buttressed himself with Jud and others, I'm really alone, will Luke be afraid of the lonely woman I'm always going to be? (I am not the fox.) No he isn't the fox, but today I thought I might be. - Luke, he isn't three yet but I think he's grown up. I think he has an adult's range of sympathies, empathies, perceptions. Although he's still truthful and still knows what he wants. I have to be as true as I can be, because he knows if I'm not. What if he decides he only wants to live with Roy? There won't be any appeal. How opaque other people are. "I'm glad you're my mommy" he said. But I have to earn that, and have to continue to earn it. It begins to seem that I don't need any theories of child raising. This is no child; he's raising himself. All I have to do is try not to lie to him. That's hard, lies come so habitually. Is that how two year olds all are? If so, what happens to them? How can people grow up in two and a half years? When all propaganda says it takes 21. When I was Luke's age I was away in the hospital; yes I remember, I was that lucid too, I remember a few very lucid lonely moments from those days. [letter] Here's another paragraph in that new dialogue with you - I don't need to say that these days I'm feeling a live connection with you, something has gone into focus, but whether it's me or you I don't know. I've been living for two days in The Four-Gated City (Doris Lessing); if you have time and need a weekend trip do please get it from the library and read it; it's full of the state I'm living in these days. It has been a long rainy Saturday, I've been prowling between my two windows like a tiger, such energy wanting to be doing enormous things, but Luke and the weather and some demon of self destruction keeping me inside and unexploded. Did you have fits like this? Dear Mary Konrad, what lives we have. Again and again my dreams are about houses. They are not the same dreams, or the same houses, but always I'm moving through them, sometimes looking for a room, sometimes just looking at its shape, its structure. The dream books say the house is the self. But these houses? Sometimes they are ruins, sometimes new light houses with sheets of windows, sometimes university residences (like hospitals?), sometimes old Victorian houses. I've just read through your dreams again. So many dreams about damage, mess, chaos, or threatening chaos - things broken and spilled. So much about responsibility and anxiety. Your dreamer really struggles doesn't she? PS I'm finished my first film - it's just a tiny little one but it's nice. [notebook] In the mystics we seem to have a fortunate variation of the race. Underhill De Chardin the noosphere Ancient psychological training institutes known as the mystery schools Highly charged cathexes (literally 'holding forces') that were involved in the neurosis Reich defense mechanisms are literally incorporated. Assagioli in Psychosynthesis "certain basic symbols that have been found to resonate to deep and transforming forces are used to initiate streams of associations leading to enlarged and healing perspectives." Related: rêve éveillé Desoille, Eidetik Jaensch, autogene of Schultz The Great Work and its ways Two kinds of mentation - by thought, ie with words, and by form (animals as well), formed in people by geographical locality, etc. Verbalizers and visualizers. John Lilly The Human Biocomputer Generations - "imaged values shift without regard to actual values" How - relax muscles by suggestion of weight and warmth, ask someone to "visualize yourself in a meadow" eg - such unspecific symbol-stimuli act like a "centre for crystallization of a specific type of visualization which differs from mere images, daydreams, or most fantasy ... similar to hypnagogic visions ... clarity of form and contact ... have a distinct life of their own which, although never completely beyond conscious control is determined largely subjectively and unconsciously ... autochthonous ... analogous to symbols of dreams ... differ in their comparative simplicity and clarity." The symbols 1. a meadow - Eden, beginning - it's best to lead them into a part where they haven't been before, projection - describe experiences and emotions 2. climbing a mountain - ambition, how high, how steep, what obstacles 3. following the course of a stream 4. visiting a house 5. the ideal personality 6. animals - visualize a cow (mother) or bull, elephant (father)! - form and behavior 7. males - rosebush - "symbolize the psychosexual development of male subjects"! "Luxuriance of its growth, richness of its color, degree to which blossoms have opened or are still growing ... ability to pick without getting pricked." Females - lonely road - car! 8. pool of water in a swamp - look down at mirror surface of the pool 9. waiting for a figure to emerge from a cave 10. eruption of volcano 11. lion meeting one's opponents 12. an old picture book - buried in cellar of old house - often related to and "compensates for what was left unsaid and unresolved during the earlier visualizations" Happich symbolic consciousness "Departure for all creative production and also for healing" 1. Go into relaxed state, then do the meadow meditation, imagine leaving the room, going through the city, over the fields, to a meadow covered with grass and flowers - comes back the same way and relates what he has seen. 2. Mountain meditation goes through forest and up peak where one can view a vast expanse. 3. Chapel meditation - through a grove to a chapel where you enter and remain a long time. When a certain depth of meditation is attained, such symbols lose their ordinary meaning and their symbolical value is slowly revealed ... meadow provides a symbol of the hypnotic level of consciousness and stimulates the emotions ... on this level represents the blossoming of life which the meditator seeks ... world of the child ... returns to the positive, creative basis of his life ... the psychically ill find it impossible to visualize a fresh meadow and during meditations cannot find one ... often must be repeated many times until the crippling effects are undone. In climbing the mountain symbolize some obstacle in his way so that he must prove himself ... transformation, spiritualization, or humanization. chapel innermost room of his psyche where he faces the simple question of how he relates to the possibilities of psychic transformation. Design meditations, word meditations One should not meditate on symbols or designs which stimulate dangerous negative emotions. first requirement of such symbols is the impression of their positive transforming power. Desoille La rêve éveillé en psychothérapie Presses universitaires, Paris 1945 Psychanalyze et rêve éveillé Paris 1950 Patient relates events as he wanders, therapist suggests approaches, symbols. patient must learn to control the archetypes within himself, to be free from them, and thereby lose his fear of them. An irrational technique, also active and synthetic. Frederking - directs his patients in progressive bodily relaxation during which they describe their discoveries - progresses from "unclear visions to increasingly clearer productions to a kind of symbolic trip ... thought allowed to flow by, scene by scene. The patient is both the playwright and the actors." He meets the contents of his Personal Unconscious and, to a degree, the Collective Unconscious, and is able to relate their contents directly and dramatically to his psychic problems ... directed to enter hell to conquer the fiendish demons ... meeting with generally unrecognized aspects of himself brings about a spontaneous healing through various transforming symbols. In dreams and symbols man is led through every sphere of the psyche, during which the forms of psychic force are able to resolve themselves without the use of other means and deep-going transformations are effected. Mauz - with 'psychotics' uses a gentler technique of leading them into "solvent pictures" of symbols he knows will awaken positive feelings and meanings within the patient, such as the security of childhood with its guiltless pleasures. Picture should "unlock and enliven the suppressed emotions of the psychotic so that he later can again connect with the world around him. The creative power which flows from these feelings and symbols aids in closing the breach in the patient's personality." - Films as initiated symbol projections are - sometimes accurate, as Mauz - often false - falsified - put there usually exploitatively - we are taught to mistrust what moves us and could be useful to us - passivity of it - conventionality, limits, banality - superficiality which barely taps us and when it does confuses us because so embedded in confusion - important to be able to put your finger on how a film does tap us, e.g. in Don't Look Now fantasy of the couple - realism as a movement confuses this issue because tries both to touch archetypes and analyze a society on another level - causes, economics, etc - definitely we try to use films as [?] - it's important therefore whether we are moved or not - Hotel Monterey great voyage into light Great archetypal healing films: Pather Panchali This section is one of my keys. Think more about what it suggests. Do meadow etc with tape recorder. Do swimming pool with tape recorder. - Zen meditation 1. relaxed breathing from abdomen, just watch it 2. diaphragm inhale, let it come into you, exhale slowly, completely, in 1, out 2, etc up to 10, repeat. Exhale 1 bring one down down to stomach etc. Mind placed thus in solar plex. Relaxation and alpha. 3. thoughts like birds flying through sky, watch them fly 4. focus on the state behind thoughts, the one upstream from them, who is the thinker, the feeler 5. contemplate thing face [journal] My lightning research into parapsychology says that those who say they astral travel and those who prophesy, clairvoy, telepath, are simple, unevolved, pushy small people. They happen to have gifts they have no good use for - no - good uses for, but the gifts do not change them.* Castaneda and Lessing - the big people, perhaps they are personae who come to them only when they write, but the fine alertness, subtlety, skill in being, the tact of them is at least sometimes there. For me: pray to have both the intransigence and fierceness that makes Lessing stand her own ground so bravely and effectively and the crying laughing openness that lets things happen to me. And that persistence in skill, finding ways to open the gates, to re-turn in memory, all of that is more important than Luke, Roy, sun, admiration, fucking, friends, future security. I must - get out of the Slade - no, not necessarily, but it divides me. Want to do the thesis, in my own way. It's something, to find out how films are like dreams and why we should think so. A notion that maybe my film-making time is like Lessing's Communist time. (Updike's life is too little.)(?) It's the working time where I learn to lose/use this female naivete for effectiveness - ie warrior, standing fast. *Corollary of that is that the little people have potential gifts and it's worth finding out what they know - Maggie's dream. [notebook] Einstein's equation, E=mc2, which says in effect that energy can manifest interconvertibly as matter or as radiation (light). Jung synchronicity an acausal connecting principle, a lawful connection between events given not by a cause and effect relationship but by subjective meaning, ie lawful coincidences, simultaneous occurrences systematically related by their inner meaning. In principle all elements could have evolved from an assumed primordial universe of hydrogen alone. Tao - process, energy, way, design, spirit, that which cannot be named, the great. "That which lets now the dark, now the light appear." Tantric yoga - symbols, visual imagery, concentration of parts of body. deeply unconscious prelogical archetypal experience Kundalini - concentration on nerve plexi, abdomen, chest, throat, neck and head - "each yields different universes of feeling and fear which can be worked through." Agni yoga and actualism - fire yoga. Tulkas - sensitives brought into monasteries. Complex - essentially an undigested perceptual, emotional or mental experience - in agni yoga, handled with light-fire, high-frequency energy. Our image of our children as 'little people'. Luke is grown up now! Man carries within him the archetype of his actual freedom. Man, according to his actual design, has the capacity of moving up or down in vibratory rate of consciousness. Media "false-to-fact designs and images of self and others" - "nervous system of the social body" Taoism - The works are meant actually to nourish or feed the inner man with matching energies. A projection of time, of complex process, not of static conceptual shape - full of suggestions and hints at extra layers of meaning, which may not be obvious at first. Portrayals of harmony were meant to induce harmony. Practical magic. Veins of subtle energy, eg calligraphy Characters are connected by a linear continuity which may be invisible where the brush tip has left the page. The meaning beyond the text is a resonance evoked by traces, each of which is unique. T'ai chi - stimulate inner currents, tracks. For self cultivation each individual needs her sexual energy aroused to its fullest pitch. Yin and yang released with orgasm - yin secreted under the tongue and from breasts. If you're really ambitious you try to store up as much of both in yourself as you can, ie you don't come, but incite as many other people to, as you can. - Deautomatization Total recall - Lessing, Updike - techniques? Huxley's technique of Deep Reflection - physical relaxation, closed head, bowed eyes, and goes into thoughts - can take 'automatic notes' without realizing he's doing it - often did it at the beginning of his day - he's oblivious to all sorts of things except what he's programmed to receive - actually has no memories of what happened while he was out. I use Deep Reflection to summon my memories, to put into order all of my thinking, to explore the range, the extent of my mental experience, but I do it solely to let those realizations, the thinking, the understandings, the memories, seep into the work I'm planning to do without my conscious awareness of them. Deep hypnosis - blanks to everything that isn't directly part of the hypnotic situation - versus literal-mindedness - partial and total amnesia established a profound emotional background of a stable character upon which he could lay effortlessly an intellectual display of ideas Deep trance, two hours of something he couldn't recall until the cue words were given - like a dream. Huxley and the baby. Other instances of regression as a trip. Could one regress into somebody else? Could I be Luke? this type of reliving of one's life has always been a spontaneous occurrence with highly intelligent well-adjusted experimental subjects Autohypnosis. Erickson. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic Arm technique for hypnagogic recall A number of occult magical procedures involve gaining conscious control over the events of the magician's hypnotic state, using the state as a 'doorway' to step through into another world of experiences. Pulling focus on self. Logic of collection Both the archetypal-physical and the mass-conscious automatisms, dangerous decisions about which is which, which is valuable The language speaking itself ESP infant-mother Hypnotism facilitates ESP. Strange experiment - people with white noise on earphones, ping-pong balls over open eyes - talked to experimenter with tape recorder - went into trances, reported ongoing dreams. Tests of field dependence and independence of perception suggest people are completely different in "sense of separate identity and tendency to use global defenses". field-dependent ... more uneasy more often caught up in an ongoing scene with imagery which, however bizarre, seems real to them ... more influenced by experimental procedure. - Dream - a catastrophe is coming, only I know (someone has told me), I struggle to get people to help me board up the windows of an old big house we live in, it's vital to keep the wind from ripping it to bits, have to store food as well - then the catastrophe has passed, I'm outside in the snow, feel my way around the edges, on a narrow ledge - the windows all concreted and stuccoed over are just shallow depressions. November [letter] Hello M, Luke's going to bed time, nowadays he chooses it himself more or less. There's the story - mostly a made-up story about a little boy called Luke! and his friend Mossy - reading books is mostly looking at pictures in the Life books about animals etc. (Most children's books are so coy and stupid I feel they insult him, anyway he likes all those strange varieties of animals he's never seen - lizards, beavers, raccoons, possums.) And then songs, Christmas songs now, O Universe, and sometimes he asks me to stay and hold his hand. Tonight I stroked his hair while he fell asleep, was so filled with peace and love for him that I felt children are not much different than lovers, we make love out of the same things: silence, concentration, careful touch. Easing Luke to sleep while joy and tenderness pooled in me, that's like being in bed with a gentle man - (I have a lot to learn about that too). Luke was a torrent today, woke this morning streaming with energy, jumped out of bed and got his empire of trucks and cars organized, demanded breakfast, hugged and teased me awake. There was nothing in the house to eat so we went to a café for breakfast, very special, eggs on toast, sitting side by side watching the workmen queue up for their tea and buns. Got on the bicycle again and drove on to school with a strong wind sending shoals of sycamore leaves big as plates rattling and scraping up from under our wheels like scared birds. For one thrilling moment we were in the middle of it and then it was gone, way ahead of us down the road, lifting and skimming in one movement like a flock. When he was at school I went down to Bloomsbury to the University of London library and sat blissfully finding a few new clues for my thesis. What a rich life I'm having - Came home to get Luke at four, brought him a tangerine to hold on the way home. We ate it waiting for a train to come by, all in the early blue dark that comes down at four o'clock these days, because it's winter now, although a month ago it was summer. We made a fire and ate chips and peanuts, grapes, pears, bread and cheese and cocoa for supper, balanced diet you know. Read the animal book and a Taoist book full of pictures of Chinese people making love - "They're fighting" says Luke. "No I don't think so" say I. Anyway he knows what they're doing, he just hasn't got the word right yet. The Tao, that web of time and change, is a network of vortices like a moving and dangerous torrent of water; and the ideal Taoist is he who has learned to use all his senses and faculties to intuit the shapes of the currents in the Tao, so as to harmonize himself with them completely. Works of art provide some of the means for bringing people into communion with the currents and vortices, giving them a deep sense of their presence and of the ways in which the tangled skeins evolve. The works are meant actually to nourish or feed the inner [wo]man with matching energies. Love to you far away in your wooden house on your snowy hill, it's 4 a.m. with you and you're sleeping in that quiet snowy blue dawn. [notebook] Dream - first night back. 'We' have taken over an old house, it's large and has big windows, we go through it eagerly exploring, finding rooms for ourselves - well furnished rooms - a child's room with a narrow bed that Luke (Rudy?) claims, a double bed I'm sitting on. Outside we find a big yard, it's in La Glace, on the edge of a wheatfield (out the back windows) - I say I could even live in La Glace, with the house (perhaps it was conjectural). We're excited to find a garage converted into rooms, also with big rectangular windows, a kind of studio. - This has reminded me of another old dream (months?) about an elegant narrow house with a family in it. I made a pretext to knock on the door and see its inside; a man showed me ingenious features (can't remember them) - the house was soon being knocked down I think. Can't remember the interesting detail in either of these dreams. Are most film dreams about houses? - Falls the shadow
- Van Ceeden [?] on dreams 1882 or something like that 1. 'Initial dreams' different he says from hypnagogic, because he knows he's sleeping but his body's flying and untired true dream that state wherein bodily sensations be they visceral, internal, or peripheral, cannot penetrate to the mind directly, but only in the physical, non-spatial form of a symbol or an image. I have no idea what 'unconsciousness' as a substantive, may stand for ... could do with the words memory and recollection and the word personality or person, in the primitive sense of persona (eg of the triple personality). The question is, where do the threads of recollection run that enable us to identify the persons? The dream is a more or less complete reintegration of the psyche, a reintegration in a different sphere, in a psychical, nonspatial mode of existence. The reintegration may go so far as to effect full recollection of day-life, reflection, and voluntary action on reflection. 2. Pathological - body states, fevers, toxins, influence the dream 3. Ordinary - dissociation, absurd, confused, little trace after waking 4. Vivid - long and vivid memory - absurd, sometimes having strong conviction that they mean something - sometimes fill a day with joy. As a child I had these delicious vivid dreams. Now they have changed their character altogether and are of the lucid type. 5. Symbolic or mocking - demonaeical produce in us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order In our dreams we see images and experience events, for which our own mind - our 'person' as we remember it - cannot be held responsible, and which must therefore come from some unknown source. Erotic, obscene. 6. General dream - sensations, ie thinking dreams without images, "not even a word or a name" 7. Lucid dreams Reintegration of psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition reaches a state of perfect awareness and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. Then I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation of lying on my chest would change to the sensation of lying on my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition - which I have since undergone many times - is most wonderful. It is like the feeling of slipping from one body to another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two bodies ... leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream-body. Think about why one 'body' of experience should be more real than another, most wonderful. 8. Wrong waking up - we think we wake up but realize that something is uncanny. - Senoi - Central Range of Malay Peninsula 1935 My data on the dream life of the Senoi would indicate that dreaming can and does become the deepest type of creative thought. The thinking we do while asleep usually remains on a muddled, childish, or psychotic level because we do not respond to dreams as socially important and include dreaming in the educative process. Senoi education: 1. child can tell his anti-social dreams to the group and be recognized 2. makes the adjustment of tension-states reasonable 3. gives control of dreamed forces relaxation and will - you take back what was projected 4. teaches that anxiety blocks creation 5. teaches responsibility for all psychic actions 6. teaches that psychic reactions are better controlled by expression and thought than repression High dreams Dream yoga for liberation Dreams reproduce a high state and it can last into waking, slightly. - Dream Friday morning - David Davies and I salvaging brick houses out of a field, pulling them out in rows like Lego blocks, with a tractor? Got the house out to a location (La Glace?) and explored it. He was going to live in it, I thought I might have one for myself. Some were broken, roofs partly missing. Looking for a basement, there wasn't one. He talked of building a - I supplied the word 'foundation' and thought of the foundation of the house at the East Place. Many small doors - I can't quite grasp the sequence but have a picture of a corridor with many small doors at various heights, behind one was a girl trying on an Indian skirt and shirt. Maybe this was a lucid dream; I can't remember whether it was during the dream that I thought about it being another house dream. Another hospital dream too, being put into bed with another girl and deciding to sleep on a sofa instead - something about Roy finking out and bringing Luke back dressed weirdly in a yellow baby's snowsuit - something more about being on an airplane and having a long stop-over. Mike's dream: he goes into the paintshop between Fortess Road and Highgate Road, a triangular shop - it's closed down but inside are all sorts of things he's always wanted - 16mm cameras and clothes - there are two manhole covers at the back - he opens one, it's nothing, he opens the other, it's a ladder going down into a tunnel. He goes down the ladder, it's broken, he fixes it, standing up to his waist in water, then he goes up the tunnel, feeling he's been there before, has cleared the rubbish out of the tunnel. He goes on for miles and miles and at last comes out in a garden, the size of Hyde Park and inside London, but completely secret and unknown; it has trees and hills. He goes back and when he's coming up out of the shop he meets secret agents like the KGB who want to nationalize it. He tries to persuade them it isn't there, builds things to disguise the entrance. - Duchamp: I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products ... I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. Readymade "a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia." Artist doesn't use instincts or visual sensibility, but a severe and puritanical logicality. Picabia "Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify." Berlin manifesto: "Under certain circumstances to be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation; to sit in a chair for a single moment, to risk one's life." Schwitters "the aesthetic potential of the unconsidered and the discarded," "the archeologist of the present." For to him the total environment was potential art. The creative act consisted in regarding, in selecting, in comparing and contrasting. He went around listening, "long journeys in trains and trams, circling and recircling the city; listening to the conversation of people, the chatter and gossip of working-class housewives, and to snatches of sentimental songs." Merzbau: began as a plaster sculpture, standing in a large room in the house he inherited from his family in Hanover. But this work was in a continual state of change and transformation. Not only a plastic presentation, it was also a statement about the inner world of irony and poetry as well as the outer appearance of visual art ... niches and pockets that 'belonged' to specific people... . Each of these holes was like a reliquary for its owner, containing various objects .... As the column grew, some were sealed up and left deep inside. Cage "Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case." Rauschenberg "I don't want a painting to be an expression of my personality. I'd really like to think the artist could be just another kind of material in the picture." "Influenced by the thinking of Existentialism ... accords primacy to existence rather than essence." Absurdity. be an attempt to cling to an outworn, dated and ineffective program that which, at any particular moment in time, gives us a new awareness and contributes (by discovery) to a visionary and idealistic future ... only be effected by means of a conceptual innovation, arising out of an examination of man and his cultural requirements. art, under the present conceptual regime of individual and egotistic expression by manufacture of a precious object with limited feedback, is at an end. cybernetic technology allowing us probable control over our environment and culture, by the objective analysis of man's behaviour. a new conceptual and objective/tactical approach to art is required now and in the future ... demonstrates creative activity as being totally connected and collective within society, rather than it being an activity oriented towards enlightenment through an isolated and non-functional art-work. a cybernetic/behavioral attitude behavioral artists tend toward using a verbal language analogous to electronic technology and computer science, rather than the language used to discuss art previously. Polarity - artists doing formal research eg Mondrian, and "those operating ideas and images ... direct communication," eg Surrealists. Games - absolute play - eg war and sex, revolution, black magic and prayer. Derivations of these become entertainment, there is little chance of archetypal and instinctive drive satisfaction. Created activities within the category of 'games' must program the participant at a level which would be equivalent to fulfillment on a ritualistic or sexual, a beatific/sensual, or on a life and death, basis. Otherwise we stay in the realms of theatricals and self-conscious participation in play. These are often enjoyable activities, but subjective, and do not ultimately offer the life opportunity of a random shot comparable to an experience in the reality of survival. Total involvement on an imaginative level can be the only goal, art has always demanded this of the artist, but never before has this demand been put to the spectator. The opportunity to create on a total activity-programming basis is wide open to all comers, a ballgame in fact. Can the academic and conditioned artist play this seriously, and in the process reject and inter in the Black Box his previous concepts, and also sacrifice his bid for fame? It depends on the individual's imagination, an acceptance of Kubrick's 2001, a Space Odyssey, and also accepting the fact that the future is much more romantic than the past. Impressionistic scholarship and seduction Logie Barrow Play - Caillois makes 4 types (adult): rivalry, chance, simulation (daydreams of media), vertigo My aim, then, is to make simulation social and dynamic, instead of repressed ... equivalent to a fantasy, but one in which one takes intentional, interpersonal, physical part in developing or representing, with or without the use of words ... confined to small face-to-face groups .... Artists (creators of physical things, though not necessarily of objects ) .... Interpersonal daydraming could encourage one to share one's worry, fear, ridicule, puzzlement over these materials. For better, this could lessen the isolation of one's processes of this type, hence increase one's confidence in them, or at least in one's worthwhileness when in such frames of mind ... need not be an escape from reasoning but rather its complement and frequently its pacemaker. Relevantly, some psychologists, for whatever it may be worth at this stage, are already making computer-analogies to the role of (no less conscious or sharable) dreams of processors of information. Steve Willats editor of Control Magazine The types of play as defined here projectively and tentatively, would be one useful way of reconciliation between Logos and Eros, each of which, without the weight of the other, tends to take off, not into irrationality (which I think they can define only together as part of praxis) but into madness (irrationality conceptually and emotionally restricted in irrational ways). WJJ Gordon of MIT, 1966, Synectics, the Development of Creative Capacity, creativity as big business. - Roy Ascott Just as our environment is becoming more and more automatic, so our habitually automatic behavior becomes less and less taken for granted and more conscious and examined. Now that we see that the world is all process, constant change, we are less surprised to discover that our art is all about process too. We recognize process at the human level as behavior, and we are beginning to understand art now as being essentially behaviorist .... Maybe the behaviorist art object will come to be read like the poem of your hand. Instead of figuration - pre-figuration. All in all we are still bound up with the search for myths. But the context will be biological and behavioral - zooming through the micro/macro levels ... the more we can dream up alternative futures the more changeable the present can become ... change for its own sake. That is the essence of behaviorist art ... can crate new rituals in the centres of learning. Artwork is hot when it is densely stocked with information bits, highly organized and rigidly determined ... admits of very little feedback ... pushing a message out through the artwork ... cool when information bits are loosely stacked, of uncertain order, not clearly connected, ambiguous, entropic ... allows the observer ... projecting his own sense of order and significance into the work, or setting up resonances by quite unpredicted interaction with it. We must also consider the cut-out mechanism which operates when an artwork overheats; when it is too hot, too densely stacked with an overburdened accumulation of bits, a sort of infinitely inclusive field. Then the system switches to a very cool state and feedback of a high order is possible. Art creates mythic futures. The mythology of change and uncertainty and the ritualization of the will to form combine in behaviorist art. Only through myth and the structures it requires can we combine the necessary paradox of definition and ambiguity, or order and uncertainty, of the tangible and the future. Levi-Strauss psycho-technology - Deduction: Artists Placement Group - art as independent research Willats: behaviorist description of art used to change people's perception, ie art as programmed learning. Hierarchy/elite Artist elicits creative behavior from audience. Artist maps a field of behavior so that audience has rich connection with variables. Deconditioning - ie learning - language learning - therefore find thresholds Inhibition and how to remove it Reinforcing a high state of drive, motivation Both inhibition to new and transfer from other behavioral contexts Use of reinforced behavioral techniques might seem repugnant, because of present associations with their use toward closed and restricted behavior, ... these forms of control if used for opening out behavior can become an important tactical method. Instead of as at the moment feeding products to an elitist market, and being patronized as long as manageable, the artist handling and obtaining hard information about perceptual and behavioral controls, which will be used towards eliciting creative and interactive behavior audience, in moving toward a point of threshold specializes their behavior, and as a result acquires a frame of reference which enables a language to be formed, operating at levels which are restricted to the behavioral situation they're in, thus enabling connections to be set up, and subsequently forming interactions with specialized visual cues/codes, etc with the minimum of elaborate orientation and maximum redundancy. Drive tactics:
Beware: over-anticipation, anxiety, played-out variables of a system, too easy System must branch, a new goal present itself "in order to reinforce a new rise in drive." Or "interaction with the sub-goals leading to gradual fixing of the Major Goal, increasing identification of the goal through interaction, this being coupled with higher states of drive." [undated journal]... The journey to Ixtlan - "people standing on the way, ... they were not real, something in their voices, in their friendliness, like phantoms; the little boy, the tone of his voice and his eagerness betrayed him, ...suddenly I realized that I had an ally and that there was nothing the phantoms could do to me." I will never reach Ixtlan .... Yet in my feelings sometimes I think I'm just one step from reaching it. I don't even find the familiar landmarks I used to know. In my journey to Ixtlan I find only phantom travelers. The world is only real when I am with this one. wrestle with the ally and tame it. If you survive the shock, which I'm sure you will, since you're strong and have been living like a warrior, you will find yourself alive in an unknown land. The feelings in a man do not die or change, and the sorcerer starts on his way back home knowing that he will never reach it. In order to be a sorcerer a man must be passionate. A passionate man has earthly belongings and things dear to her - if nothing else, just the path he walks. Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. Because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a woman with the wonder of being a woman. (It's sickening transcribed that way.) My sadness was so overwhelming that I felt euphoric. I embraced them. If you want to survive you must be crystal clear and deadly sure of yourself. In the encounter with the ally. - Recurring suspicion that everything I do needs to be pushed further, everything stops too soon, I'm blinded, don't get outside to see how everything, like this writing, is still mechanical, conventional and mass-minded. Possession by the social being. Phantom. The language thinking. Many moments when I come to out of a kind of darkness, or do I close down, into some kind of darkness, I feel something like - this is not real. Need to work hard at hunting energy in various ways (being beautiful, being thin and healthy, being excited, being mysterious - how you get power from other people - how you get power from things - work, concentration, surrounding yourself with - no, having contact with - beautiful things, scarcity, discrimination - being wise to attractive things, colors, knowing what you need - power for yourself - truthfulness, courage, scaring yourself, thinking, making, doing hard things). And with this energy? Make more to really learn something about what's possible. To really make some psychotronic generators, films that wake people up, remind, record, hint, tease. Body - to make it sensitive as well as beautiful. (At Senate House the librarian from Ghana who told me about a recurring dream, she's always on the way to a place she heard of in her childhood, a river, trying to get there by various means, sometimes she does get there and it is always the same.) My dreams last night, part of it a journey with Judy, we left a place, a cottage somewhere? - came to a forest with high trees, workers, were going to stay there. I shouted that we had left Luke alone and couldn't possibly just leave him. She seemed to think we could. Full of journeys this dream, at the end it wasn't my journey but a kind of story about a middle aged woman who left her lover (earlier, I'd had a lover whom I met sometimes in spite of Grandpa and Grandma interfering - anxiety), a middle aged man, to journey back by a different route because their thing was secret, they got there at the same time, the man walking, she (and he?) met by crowds of (her?) children on a hillside. Have to give up, can't get them back. Learn where the blocks are, to recognize them at least. [other notebook] [notes on the pool]
Manipulation of triggers, assoc with prestige - trigger-surrogates.
Strasbourg, dancing, Anna Karenina, Chantal's film, morning at Dyck's farm New earth and self ecstasies: knowledge, contact, union (self loss) - suggests that "people of developed intellect or creative capacities" have the latter three, higher valued, more frequently than the humdrum or exclusively "pleasant and stimulating" vs "thrilling and apocalyptic." Wordsworth: I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if under any circumstances the attention is energetically braced up to the act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if the intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Quoted in Bateson, Wordsworth: a re-interpretation p.25 Quietism: "soul consciously refuses all discursive meditation but simply rests in the presence of God in pure faith" the professor who was determined to read the riddle of the world, took chloroform, and with tremendous mental effort just before unconsciousness overtook him, managed to write "A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole." "Sensation of transcendent ecstasy" You suddenly discover a faculty working with effortless efficiency which enables you to hold in the forefront of conscious feeling both knowledge of the smallest bacteria in the field, how the blade of grass works, and the universe in the same detail - all you know about nature, the whole thing, you can think about them all simultaneously and not in parts, ... that knowledge is almost limitless - one's aware objectively of what one's doing but not aware of anything else, not aware of yesterday or tomorrow, just of the moment, doing this now. Nietzsche: Perhaps the whole of religion may appear to some distant age as an exercise and a prelude, in like manner as the prelude and preparation of science ... would man have learned at all to get on the tracks of hunger and thirst for himself, and to extract satiety and fullness out of himself, without that religious schooling and preliminary history? P.234 of JW
triggers form a group to which high prestige is widely accorded, and which are widely accepted as entitled to reverence and freedom from contamination. necessary but not sufficient cause Underhill: "Wordsworth, with Plato, Heracleitus, Tennyson and Whitman in whose works we sense indications that they too were acquainted, beyond most poets and seers, with the phenomena of the illuminated life" - eg Boehme, Fox and Blake One set of words was the truthful mirror of her thoughts; no others, however apparently identical in meaning, would do. She had strong practical regard for the simple holy truth of expression .... She would wait patiently searching for the right term, until it presented itself to her. Gaskill on Charlotte Brontë "To be forced by desire into an unwarrentable belief is calamity." Richards "Overbelief represents the most desired answer to an urgently asked question," eg falling in love. Conduct based on ecstatic experience runs against social contracts. Established religion insists that ecstasy must be positive, not negative or barren. Everything that is good makes me productive. I have gratitude for nothing else, nor have I any other touchstone for testing what is good. Nietzsche To be life-enhancing, visible things - with which we are here concerned - must be presented in a way to make us feel we are perceiving them more quickly, grasping them more deeply than we do ordinarily .... It follows that only works of art can be life enhancing, for merely visible things in themselves are not - except when we have learnt to enjoy them as if they were already works of art. Berenson Aesthetics and History 1950 As is the case in all mystical experience, I acquired faith in my vision and its revelation of values. This faith has never abandoned me, although often enough one has moments of dryness. Berenson If the feeling for movement or the feeling for 'functional line' is almost identical with the feeling for quality, and if it is psychologically a condition of ecstasy, it may be as rare as the mystically religious experience and as unintelligible to those who have not had it. - Two wooden people, heads alike, flat, holding their hands up palms pressed against their chest, strong legs set onto sides of body, stand together like Adam and Eve caught out, apprehensive, still, sad, his erect little penis is painted red, and her slit is drawn red on a triangle of black. Her face is cracked on one side, two cracks not meeting, one from the chin comes up under her eyes, and one from the top of the head, runs beside the other alongside the top of her nose. Another long crack curving across her chest has its origins in a thin line from her anxious mouth. He has green shell eyes and mouth painted red, her eyes are carved out like her mouth which is the same shape, a little longer. Strong calves and kneecaps. They were once daubed with a pretty colored clay? But now most of it has worn off except inside the thighs, under the arms pressed to the chest, around the nose and hair where it comes to the face. [notes on Mayan artifacts in the museum] [notes on super-8 film] [undated journal] Incident. Roy comes to see me with Luke, Luke rushes to give me a present. I'm glad to see them. Hold Roy for a long time. Say I'm very well. Luke is opening my package, I go to help him. Roy lies down, closes his eyes. I get full of panic, begin to tidy things, he's such a weight lying there. I want to tell him to go home. Ask him if he'd like to go out, or else have some coffee. He says he's been surrounded by witches and just wants to rest. Then I sit down on the chair and say "Roy I don't like you coming here and going to sleep." He says "I'm not asleep." "Metaphorically then. It makes me feel used and I don't mind being used if it doesn't interfere with me, but it does interfere with me." Roy stands there in his plaid coat and permed hair and says "I don't mean to blackmail you but ..." and I say, "Are we going to have that speech again about how if we're not careful you're never going to see us again?" "Something like that." "Or because I have the temerity to say I don't want to be used, I dare to oppose you? You just want to be flattered like everybody else." He stops on the rug and says "It isn't that I want to be flattered, I just want a little sympathy." I say "But it's the way you do it, you just come in and flop down, as if you don't want to be here, but you just don't want to be at the commune." He stalks out. I mutter "That coward" and Luke runs to the window and begins to cry. I say it's alright, he'll come back. Take his hand and bring him out to where Roy is just taking things out of the car. We go back with the alphabet and raisins. Roy says "I didn't come here with the intention of dumping him. I didn't bring his clothes. But I'm desperate, I just need to be alone for a while." "But you were all last week and that doesn't seem to have done you any good." "What a facile thing to say, as if every moment isn't different." He's on his way out. Luke says "I want to go to Buckingham Road" and begins to cry. Roy says, hard voice, "I'm not going to Buckingham Road, I'm going to do some work." Luke hits him, Roy looks at him, gathers him in, holds him. Luke is paying no attention to me. I'm just watching and silent. They go off. I say "Luke can I say goodbye to you." He says "I want to go now." I say "Can I just say goodbye to you, it doesn't take long." He stays away and Roy says bitterly from the door "He knows where it's at" and they go out. Then they come back, knock. Roy says he just wants his alphabet. They come in, gather up the alphabet. Luke at the door says "I want to go to Buckingham Road, I want to go home." I'm just frozen. He struggles to shut the door, Roy sends him back with a packet of raisins. I come to the door and say "I want to give you a kiss because I'm glad to see you." I do and he kisses back, goes a few steps, stops and looks at me. I want to make it easier for him and say "See you" and he goes. I'm left feeling self righteous about needing to have opposed Roy who was wrong to dump such a weight on me, very sad about Luke in the middle of it, hurt that he so definitely wanted to be with Roy and not stay - although I guess it's because he senses that Roy's hurting and wants to leave him. Angry that Roy can make such a scene and use Luke in his quarrels without scruple, needing to talk to him about it, feeling it always happens too fast and I'm not in time to prevent the drama that I think must be awful for Luke - I'm afraid of these showdowns that might always leave Luke choosing Roy, just uneasy because he seems to get chewed up in something that's not necessary, because of our egos, Roy's loss of control, trying to think how it could have been different, if he'd just asked if he could ... made a deal ... explained to Luke. I'm so overwhelmed by his desperation, I can't handle it strategically but just confront - which is always wrong, he's always overwhelmed by confrontation, and then dashes away, which stabs Luke, which makes him long for Roy, which hurts me and makes me stand aside to let him be and not fight over him. So here I am with my control and righteousness but I did the wrong thing, for me and for Luke, although maybe the right thing for Roy - "He has to learn that he can't treat me like his mother," "We have to set up some boundaries we can trust," etc, "He can't just use me to unload, not in that way." - Turns out it was just right for him. Catharsis. Then call him on the telephone. He's in high spirits, crisp and intelligent talking about ruthless compassion, out-classing me in that other way he has, kindly, full of himself. Remember. "Ruthless, but also endlessly altruistic." Ros - the shiny mane of brassy hair, focused at the eyes, shrunken bottom, light narrow shape lightly moving to make coffee with which to intoxicate ourselves, listens intelligently with her large brown eyes and pointed chin making a triangle of her white face. She always makes me talk, but when she talks I'm a little uneasy as if I'm being false, because really I think I'm more wonderful than she. That's what keeps me uneasy with everyone except those that I'm uneasy with because I think they're better than me. What a drag. Her guest, Mavis? flamboyant lady making exaggerated speeches with her big bright red mouth, I couldn't be easy with her because I despised her self-educated uncertainty, pushing herself, "I'd call myself an intellectual" but I only despised her because she was too nearly myself. That same boring mechanism, isn't there some way to learn not to be guilty with everyone one doesn't want to be. Am I really so near collapsing - stupid business of needing to choose oneself all the time. Where's the objectivity and compassion, feeling sorry for oneself? I'm so determined to be wonderful, useful, but how it makes me small, provincial, find out how. Does Doris L do it by de-scribing? Seeing? Thought about R not doing that and thereby charming people, but I think he does it another way, by identifying with them through his self pity, that's compassion but it's corrupted by its usefulness - think it makes him guilty because it makes him too powerful. To be dispassionate is not to see yourself in everything. Does that leave room for just looking and marveling? What happens to transcend it, at the Sufi farm, is contact, doing something together, they show their gifts until maybe I do want to be them a little? Or else is that dislike the initial vacuum of just not knowing anything about them other than the evaluation - do I want to be them? A little opening space. Always I'm so slow, laborious, makes me ashamed. I should be able to understand these things, fix them and move on, but it's so slow. I forget what I know, circular and superficial. Knocking on the walls around and around. That engrained American literal-mindedness. Need to be born again and reeducated. But Lessing's a bit like me I think: slow, but with good instincts. Determined. Knowing the ways to slide through certain gates, maybe she's quick. Could I have more facility at making films. No education there, or not much training. Joe looking at the family picture where I'm a smiling girl of ten, head tilted, sweet, self possessed, very present, and said "That's who you are for me." Ah! Not guilty with him, cause I love him, makes me interesting. There's a key. Choose yr people. BUT. Make worthy opponents of them. Allies are something else. Need to take photographs again. Not so confused. Could have a policy of not recognizing a problem without really working to find the solution to it. Problems are gifts, can throw ropes around them, maybe eat them.
Write a complete story about one of those encounters. What if it came undone this problem? Try to imagine fantasy solutions. Like Elias. Elias standing in the barn, wool hat on and hair springing up from under it, so beautiful - never seen a man's face as beautiful as Elias'. Stood there against the struts of the tower, I wanted to stare but could only take furtive flashes, he seemed tall, but his face, it was a god the fatherly face, it shone. It shone. His eyes are very brown and warm, cheeks and the skin of his nose clear, fine, unworn and rosy, mouth cut distinctly, smiles a lot, bunches his cheeks up, white even teeth, what a child of plenty, what a shining saint he is, his voice is the same always controlled and humorous. Christina sounds false and apologetic, warped - female softening itself to flatter - but he's nothing but assurance. Poor Christina. Does he does he want to be her too? Because of her fine hands, small feet? Presence, self-remembrance. [notebook] Christmas Eve - familiar grief because I can't make it back, there's no one here, just something lonely that envies and mistrusts, a hole; Luke with his sleeping smile when I came in, he asked me to stay with him when he woke crying, said "You can stroke my hair if you like" and held my hand to his cheek with the back of his hand. That brings me back in a little glow around the place he touches me, but where's the rest, I'm resenting everyone. By nature so critical and still ashamed and weak about that criticism, refusing to take responsibility for it, by nature so envious and then resentful, I can't be generous to those I admire, still looking for the strategy that will make me powerful so that I can stop being envious. I can only love those I want to be; but when I love people it is really that someone, I've chosen out of the circuits I am, I've chosen, nobody chooses me, so I'm sad here, Luke chooses me so I'm alive with him. Turning my head out the door at the first second when I see the space of stars it is ambiguous, it's like another, near space, like the space between my eyes when I meditate. There's a very strong triangle of blue stars that twinkle. Quite a lot higher there's another smaller star that makes the tail of a diving kite, very strong geometrical formation. Caught a star in the black puddle on the edge of a field. Oh my life, where is it, it's crooked and it's schief, I'm so closed to everything but resentment, and in reading, little fleeting unconnected possibilities that are like escape fiction. Woke up loving Joe, but am smothered in that; am smothered with Roy, am just always smothered with men so I have to be glad when I don't care about them. Kindness from women who are kind out of habitual self abnegation. How many times today have I said something and simply not been heard. When we walked, the stars rolled at our own pace, through branches. Just the sad present moment with its long past of winters and Christmases, its shabby present, past without importance of position, still unborn and maybe dying more and more, I care, there's no reaching, ineffectuality, but then not only feel sorry for myself, there's a distance made of this sadness that after all is a life in me, struggled to light up with ten times the light I have now, the light's going out but it's struggling. To be clairvoyant, telepathic, a healer, all that guarantees nothing of sensitivity, tact. I choose those very few that I love but If I'm right, if I'm in tune, does everyone love me anyway What a confusion of loneliness. It's the shoulder smelling of roses that I want, that side - could be anyone's - to stroke in the concentration of love that I've lived in a few times. Not anyone's. On Christmas morning we sat down to stollen and oranges, apples, the cake with raisins and fruit in it, nuts crunching under our teeth, what pleasure. We sat and sang O Give Thanks, Dona Nobis Pacem. I looked around, trying to fix the faces, blessing them. Just sat in bliss. Luke. For supper there was bean salad, curried carrots ("sour" said Luke), a chopped cabbage salad with something in it (horseraddish?) and the cake with blackberry yogourt sauce. Afterwards we sat around nearly in silence, the whole roomful. Agneshka was bouncing on her knees with joy, I could only smile and smile, Elias looked across the table, smiled and smiled back, I found Micha in the corner and smiled and smiled at him too. Filled with a shared joy, the square of people with its points of concentration. Astrid always watchful (after breakfast we sang German songs, I rushed after her to the kitchen to say did she know Es ist Eine Rose Entsprungen, she said for that I must come back in the dining room, it was her favorite carol, also O du Heilige O du Fröhliche. In the evening, fire all day in the meditation room, Melody at the piano, Micha drumming, Elias on the recorder, then guitar, Huzur on the vina, Warrener singing, but mainly the strong triangle Elias-Huzur-Micha eventually losing their heads, yipping and shouting, Miriam and I danced for a while (and Agneshka, delicately, came from the fire) but it went past us. When they stopped I came to sit on the bench - Elias came straight toward me and I got up to meet him and we hugged each other. He swings that place. How unclouded his face is. How clear he is. He hugs me a lot. I just remember the last time I was there, when he said goodbye, the way my body was quick - way ahead of me - to rise on its toes and fit itself along him like - unmistakably - a man and woman, knowing the interlocking position instantly. I was embarrassed afterwards. Hugging Christina delicately from the shoulders up, for instance. Friday 28 Dec 11:15 pm Uneasy about Luke all this evening, psychological, worried about his getting phoney and out of touch with real contact with people - ie truthful - called Roy - someone says Luke is very happy all day. Am I worried about Roy? 1:05 am - R calls - voice says a little alcohol - uses self pity to hit me hard - I think of Don Juan saying a warrior doesn't let people bring you down - so I tell thim what he's doing - talk about myself and how his panic always hits me hard in the stomach - talk about my working day - get a focus on myself - ie make myself solid* - then before he goes, when I'm saying goodbye, he hits me with self pity again as if to say I won't let you go before I've brought you down - but he doesn't make it. *Talk about how he's showing all the symptoms of sitting on a bad spot - thereby turn my focus back on him - felt as if I was actually zapping him, not to hurt him but to stop him harming me - felt strength come back. worthy opponents -
- The bookstore - dirty blue apron, man who looks ordinary but whose eyes are clear - says in a Cockney accent that he thinks the spirit world is exactly like the material world - "over there, here" and if you're a materialist here you'll be one there. He looks decrepit - a little familiar, where've I seen him? - A place in my back has got sensitive; electrical prickles. - The problem that all these people like Rampa are so limited, unevolved, tied up in the most banal kind of consciousness with Reader's Digest popular style of writing - like Fazal and unlike David except for his sexism - ie you need to be intelligent too. - The eyes of that man on the wall, David's eyes I avoided. - Resolve to catch those extraordinary faces - like the man in Notting Hill - camera? - Use fantasies to get ideas. - I cannot sing secularly. December 31 [letter] Ten to five. Outside the kitchen door, outside the window above it, the night sky is light blue, a quarter moon with a yellow nimbus round about it, one bright star, maybe a planet, two less bright stars, and when you stare, countless other stars as pale as freckles, just coming out - like a rash you're not sure is there. The fire's purring, roaring, in its round container, one of the cats is asleep in front of it. London's wonderfully dark, like a foreign city, like Athens, because the coal miners' strike has made them turn off the street lights. Luke is away, with Roy, until Thursday, and I have been at home fasting, praying a little, studying (my own studying), writing, looking for patterns in journals and notebooks that have gathered - gathered up last year. At this moment life is so tenuous, so aware of itself and aware of its own passing, that I'll just listen and tell you what's there. The cat rattling the coal shuttle, it rings on the tiles for a second. The clock ticks, coal scrapes in a whisper as it feeds itself down into the fire. The cat licks itself noisily - this is the other cat, who's come in through the hole in the window. Cars pass. Along the walls in this room are a tall green plant next to the front windows, a brown chest with a cushion on it that's a special, faded blue; another chest next to my bed, with square blue cushions and a red and blue and white cover; a green box and above it the board full of my household spirits: a bloody mouthed lioness roaring, a turtle stranded on shining rippled sand, a bobcat with a bird in her mouth, a green snake rearing her tail, an old elephant, an Afghani girl with her arms crossed over her chest (like me in the baby photograph), an Eskimo shaman whose eyes scare me. The colors are all clear light colors, red, blue, green, the perceptual primary colors, the three colors we have receptors for. That just happened. And these household spirits, who just happened as well, what do they mean? They say I'm this and I want to be that, I have these powers and want those. They're a prayer too, but I'm not sure for what. And here's this album from you. All these snapshots telling stories I didn't know before, that fat baby in the front garden doesn't look like Luke, and not even when she's older, except for something in the expression. There's a flower bed with stones around it, and some kind of vine is climbing the wall. I don't remember the house ever having flower beds - I remember a hole in the ground where people had thrown broken china. Grandma always in her becoming hats. But she looks old to me even then. And you look as I remember you, exactly as you still look in my mind, you always look exactly the same age to me. (What age will I always be to Luke?) There you all are on a Sunday, smiling in Grandma's orchard, and there's a bed of petunias? No no, nasturtiums, and that's me holding one - is that why I still love nasturtiums? Fat little hands and a white handbag! Who made the joke that's making the young ones smile? Was it Father, who's looking so pleased with himself? Only Grandpa is looking dignified. He too looks exactly as he's always looked. And there's the studio picture, Grandma's fine ankles. Little me in the middle with eyes that are the blackest thing in the picture. Why does Father look so wan? Why are you all so sad? Was this a picture meant to remind you of mortality? You look like I look now, your face has lost its chubbiness since that picture in the orchard, although, there, you're maybe four years younger than I am now - is it possible? The Clearbrook house! The corner stand of spruce trees, the chicken house, the apple trees, the clothesline! I've never seen this photo before, it was a real gift - oh, and it's taken from - Grandma's window? The schoolgirl, smiling with her mouth shut, not showing the missing teeth, red dress and red hair ribbon. Soft childish neck, head on her side, she looks embarrassed and whoever did her hair made a mistake. Who took this picture of the little white house and its fence? Why? The window is open but the trees are bare - there's the pole for the radio's aerial. Who painted the tips of the pickets? Another family picture - you took me well into my childhood, and then back into yours, you're eighteen? In that lace collar, all of you in the bush, Grandpa and Grandma on kitchen chairs, young saplings all around you. Or was that the summer of your marriage. You so pretty - did you know how pretty? Is Grandpa's hair silver even then, or was it blond? You're all of you so washed with light, squinting, faces burned out. Grandma's lovely face. How does she always look in your memory? It's something special, the group of you on the edge of growing up, all surrounded by leaves and everything dazzled by that Peace River sun. Overleaf: here's what came of it - who'd have thought: a lady sitting in an Ontario lake with nothing on. The same lady on a strip from a machine in Paris, in degrees of happiness because her true love is teasing her outside the booth. The same lady in London, smiling under a big hat like Grandma's, but with live daffodils on it, and there in a carrycot looking at the Mayday ballons is - Luke. And then it's four pages of baby Luke, sleeping, yawning, smiling fat creature, looks like nobody, where did he come from? We're back to the beginning of the book, the fat baby who looks like nobody. And then there's that big country with the long hill, bits of forest in it still. Threshing machine like a dragonfly. Paul, Rudy. The new place next to the road, come out of the bush you grew up in and we grew in, a house with no tree within a hundred feet, it's never seemed right to me that house, it's like the ark when the water's subsided. But bush next to the wheatfields, o you never knew what magic there was in those vast tracts of trees, the holy places we knew about! Dived into when we got away from shoveling grain. Running down the cowpaths hearing the threshing machine's grinding fading behind us. Here's a picture with foxtail in the foreground, foxtail and old boards lying in the pasture, that's a whole package of memories. Another chapter. In this country, behind these children, there's a marriage. Maybe the last marriage in this chain? There's Marichen in white stockings and the lace collar, arms along your sides, you look poised to become anyone. You in the leaves again, aren't you shapely (I was never so shapely even in my prime!), your wrists look so fine. And there you are, young woman with your hands by your sides, four? children later, lots of hair (it's nice that way), looking skeptical. That picture's called maturity - the look on your face is very like the one I'm wearing, holding baby Luke the spring after he was born. Does it mean, oh, men, they cause you more pain .... You're beautiful, you two standing in front of the pickets - they're leaning there, and the caragana hedge has grown up around the house, was that your 10th wedding anniversary - think maybe it was. And oh M, there you are another fifteen years later, only fifteen? Standing in the young bushes, back in the leaves by yourself, standing in the strong sun again but with your face in shadow (looks like late afternoon - did you pose yourself there remembering the others? Yes surely you did. Your bouquet of organdy sweetpeas, you didn't have it any more - we demolished it. So there's your typical absurdity, a wedding picture in which the bride holds her flowers in a prominent canning jar! But the house, this version of it, has got flowers beside it again. New chapter. Grandma and Grandpa sitting at the table, makes me think of the night Roy and I came to have a goodbye tea with you, that was a nice ceremony. I wish I could have had a nice ceremony for you when we were in London; it just wasn't possible for me then; I'm sorry, it was a hard time. The house, a field of dandelions in front of it, and a little boy playing there who could be Luke. We'll come. Rudy and his car. - When the doctor asked Luke (who had an earache) "Is your name Luke Chisholm," he looked ready to weep and said "No it's not." "What is it then?" "It's Luke Epp Chisholm." He doesn't understand exactly about growing up, and because I've told him that someday he'll be as big as Roy, he thinks maybe we turn into other people. He said to Roy, "Someday, will you be Ellie Epp?" He says "One day, when I will be a little baby ..." and "once when I was big like Roy ...." He had a birthday party at Roy's house, and went from birthday presents to pre-Christmas presents when Roy and G'an'ma and I had a little party just before we went away, and Roy let him open some presents then, and we had a cake with three penguins on it (he ate them all) and a little tree and a candle, and I gave Grandma a flowering primrose in a pot. (She gave me a bottle of cleansing lotion, which I don't use.) And then when on the 21st we got on a bus and went to the Sufi Farm, where we worked on the barn until the evening of the 24th, walked among cows and young orchard trees, looked for the invisible roe deer in the forest. One day I spent chopping wood, got a good swing and did it very well in remembrance of Frank so handsome at your woodpile. I'd sent the barn a letter and nailed it up among the rafters. Was going to go on to tell you about Christmas, but I'm tired now - thank you for the very beautiful wooden steam shovel with a shovel that really works - it has a string and when you wind it up the long arm lifts and the shovel yawns open - that you gave Luke for Christmas [she sent money]. He really loves it; opened it before Christmas, slyly, when I was somewhere else, and when I took it away and hid it until Christmas Day he asked for it first thing every morning and at least six times a day, and when it was Christmas morning he said "And NOW can I have my steam shovel?" and there it was under the tree. I made him a kite and a dolfish - a stuffed dolphin with smiling eyes. Lots of other stuff, I think too much. A car from Roy that he can sit in. Money. I think this is a bad time to ask you for any, especially if you're saving to travel. What if for the time being I ask for half of it - leave the rest - I'm sure to sell the car and also I have a little cleaning job, it should be enough to buy and shoot the film, if not I'll ask for the rest. The processing costs etc I'll try to get from the Arts Council. But on the other hand, with world food shortages - we're almost out of rolled oats here in England - the price of grain must be good. Let me know how things are. The $250 please send by bank cheque from your/Father's bank and send it to me - the bank will know what to do. As soon as possible please, time's very short before the pool closes and there's not much sun in January and February so I must grab every shooting day I can. Many thanks; I'm hesitant to ask for it because I don't really feel that Father owes me anything, but for this film I'm just deeply grateful for the chance to make it; in a way it's the making of me, it's a coming-out and a dowry. It will be good; it's really a shout of praise, I think Father will approve. [journal] December 31 1973 Ten to five, outside the kitchen door, night sky. Wrote all that for Mother, went through the book with her, I'm tired. All the echoes in it, my mother's face and mine, with the same skeptical and careful look on it. All the children, dwindling down to our one each, my nostalgia for Mother's youth, and then Grandma's, their fatter old faces. I half stiffen with determination not to get heavy like that, never. Grandma's smooth hostile young face doesn't promise eleven children, nine of them alive to bring up, the calm of her old smile, perhaps I will see them again, take Luke to be blessed. Our little time.
[notebook] Costumes - comfortable invented new every morning Children - their own selves but teach how to resist rubbish at their own level - not to allow themselves to be bored Philosophy - thinking about where you are Reevaluation - reeducation
[notes on cars and 2CV I bought from Jill Chisholm] london volume 7
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