| london volume 7 part 2 - 1974 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Meeting Liz Anne looking pale and rough in sheepskin, very nice, open in her face, peaceful and wanting me to meet her favorite people, Tip and Su Allen. She's not the smart lady now. Then, that green coat and fur hat! Seeing Keith [Jackson] alone in one of the college rooms, face thinner and a little pale, brown eyes kindled, we were glad to see each other; wants a quiet white place he said, I said I was making a quiet blue film. More in that dream about a house - I can't get it back - in which the floor simply broke off into a drop, ravine, an abyss, someone surefootedly walked about near the edge of it, there was a wall missing, or were the walls all missing? It was Italian? Someplace Mediterranean. Bodies. Clamping up to Roy this afternoon in a friendliness of its own. Warming to Keith's white face and black eyes, always aware of his legs. So revolted by Mohan that I couldn't look at him, and found his little offering about liking to keep in shape, ridiculous and pathetic - little moist hands with pointed fingers - oh! Beautiful Margaret here flinging her hair, beautiful Shoshanna theatrical from her toes up, we talked about her going to Peru, looked at it on the map, I bubbled with longings and daydreams, and decided to make a list of the treasures that can't be left. - Repeated dreams of gardens, my garden or my flowerpots flowing over with surprising growth. On the tapes - fighting with Luke, laughing, singing (although precariously on key sometimes - and I've always thought my ear was perfect) I sound like Marilyn, warm and rich. That encourages me but then I look at my lumpy forearms and fat upper arms, my aging thighs bruised, pimpled, rippling with fat and stretch marks, and I feel so ugly; when I'm a charwoman I feel so failed, nearly twenty nine and no life really begun. - Understanding that if I must live as a warrior - no question about that, as I'm not a mother and not a wife and certainly not a scholar and even more certainly not an - artist - then I must train for it, because it is not easy and is not 'natural.' By mutation I'm forced to become a genius or die very soon, something like that. "Every pain seems to name itself as part of my death." Put like that, I'm fighting. The pain and terror of creation, I didn't believe it. Hard times that are coming, perhaps they'll be better. 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 [woman] do not die or change, and the sorcerer starts on [her] way back home knowing that [she] will never reach it. Only a warrior can 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]. 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. [undated notebook] [notes on postproduction costs and procedures] [notes on rushes] 1. should be closer, tripod and a little underexp. The speed is ok. All of these are a little overexp. 2. 3 little girls - framing is completely wild. Booths. Okay but over exp, not v. good. Does show swimmer. Brief. 3. the fairylight - q does handholding matter - breaks down beautifully, slows down well. Is it better than other? 4. another effort at booths - v pale - unsaturated. Do a long section where she crosses there and comes. Ok exp for mirrors. Get closer. At that angle mirrors hang on tube. 5. puddle nice but no depth of focus. mysterious. Dark - brief. 6. the stairs - lovely light, splash good. 7. boys in shower - back of shower in focus, they aren't quite, doesn't matter. Use it from the bit after the boy closes the curtain. - [project list] Il faut toujours travailler. My accidental pans, 50' very slight, 100' about half. How does it fit my strange plan. Could be at the beginning - reticence of it. Want it to be more reticent. [notes on Mafalda film} - Verity - name for a girl, very Photochronography - study of time by light, neologism of a schizophrenic - Richter visual rhymes - pulling a bell rope and climbing a rope, kicking baby and running man, diving and flying, kissing and punching - David Sylvester oriental carpets Allegiance to one's own civilization is largely an allegiance to its iconography. David Pye: workmanship of risk, workmanship of certainty Also distinguishes rough / precise, regular, accurate What we want is diversity that begins at the smallest visible scale and develops continuously upwards from that. Because of the methods of forming of clay and metals, "soft properties being expressed in hard materials." Notes on equivocality and high polish on wood which erases the surface - age and irregularity, fine scratches network - provides the boundary. Virtual images - reflected in wood, silver etc. Colors take half their life and interest from the quality of the surface in which they inhere. - Pseudomorphosis false formation of crystal solidified in a rock crevice or other mold incongruous to its inner structure. Hero deeds - classical mystery tradition. A sober intoxication Condensation - feature of the wide view of grace Spengler on historicism "influence", "continuity", and "effect". Such labeling is pure 19th century. What is sought is merely a chain of causes and effects. Everything 'follows', nothing is prime. He says what's interesting is "all the seeking, resisting, choosing and interpreting, misunderstanding, penetrating and revering - not only between cultures in immediate contact with each other but also as between a living culture and the world of forms of one dead .... Vol II p 62 or Eng ed p 55 - Magnetism - waves in water, currents and [notes on sound recording] If no absorption took place, then the intensity of the sound would increase and continue to do so for as long as the sound was maintained. Noise "succession of vibrations following one another at irregular intervals and with no definite pitch ... heavy transients ... and are consequently difficult to record, reproduce." Transients - sudden impulses of sound of a nonperiodic nature Sometimes you can remove the fundamental without a noticeable difference, "ability of the ear to reconstitute the fundamental from the difference in frequency between consecutive harmonics"."But suppression of harmonics alters character and pitch of sound. In sounds with inharmonic overtones, distortion if fundamental is suppressed. [notes on ferromagnetism] All magnetic phenomena arise, either from the rotary motion of electrons within the atom or as a progressive drift of electrons along the conductor. Maybe iron atom has a third shell which is incompletely filled, the magnetic field set up by rotation of the electrons not neutralized completely. Paths of magnetism appear to complete a circuit (lines of force) By convention it is assumed that their direction is from N to S in the region surrounding the magnet, and from S to N within the body of the magnet. The lines of force never cross because "at one point in space there can be only one direction in which the magnetic forces can act, namely the resultant of the separate forces. Earth is surrounded by its own magnetic field. Magnet goes N-S to be parallel with lines of force of the earth. [more notes on mag tape and mag editing] [letter, end of January] It's just been your birthday. Ten days ago when you wrote you were sad and delicate: me too. Now I'm much tougher and gayer again, and hope you are as well. So you are fifty: you know for me you are always about thirty one, and you say will Luke mind having a grandma of no fixed age - oh, you know, he has another grandma who's in her seventies. (Really! Catherine was forty six when Roy was born.) Grandpa Epp [had just died]. The bridge across - arched over - one generation to reach the next. That was us, especially Paul and me, who feel him to be our real ancestor. Makes me think; because Luke with his passion for machinery could have been the real boy Father would have approved. As things are, I don't know how things will be between them, because Luke's being allowed a freedom Father won't approve. I'm sure Luke will be filled with delight by a model Case tractor. You'll see the peddle car Roy gave him for Christmas. He drives it to the store - I have to push uphill, bent double to reach down to his sporty level, and then I have to run ahead on the way home, to make sure he doesn't lose control and fly into the street. How old was Grandpa? How strange that beings come into the world, get old, and leave it again. Melville. Moby Dick. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is death. But the fruit of ignorance is also death. Knowledge: if you want to know you have to be a warrior. Knowledge is dangerous, knowledge breaks down your tissues, it wears you away. And so you have to get even more knowledge, to know how to look after yourself. I wrote a little fable over Christmas that accidentally talked about knowledge. Have you read Journey to Ixtlan? Handbook for warriors and (wo)men of knowledge. Today was a beautiful day, after a month of rain. I was in my swimming pool doing sound recording for my film - it was the first time I had ever 'taken sound' - there I was, earphones on, 30' of cables around me, a microphone in my gloved hand (gives better sound) and a neat piece of $1500 recording machinery next to my knee as I squatted at the water's edge sucking little sounds into my bag: birds singing under the glass roof, water chuckling along the poolside, the shower crackling like fire, a single swimmer beating closer and then further, children's shouts, far away voices, footsteps, someone whistling in the corridor. The technology of it frightened me very much before I began, but now it's easy and I have really broken another barrier. O my film. Sometimes I'm so sad that it can't be the film I have in my head - but it will be. Something like a baby: that I can't predict, only dream toward. Yes, the money came and is mostly spent to buy film, all's well, it's found a good home. Thank you; it came in time too. Imagine money turning into light! Such a lot of money turning into such a lot of light. And what a lot of films I have in me - they're more like eggs, I've got a lifetime supply of ideas for films, all they need is to meet up with a strong moment of decision and they can begin to grow. Last week, when I couldn't work, couldn't get a camera, skies black, ill with a cold, sad, lonely, but most of all undermined by the fury of not being able to work, and time so short, I discovered what other people have called the pain and terror of creation. Today all's well again.
It has also been called, for instance, Silchester Road Public Baths 1878-1974, and Natural Light and Time's Place. Anyway, whatever its title, today I showed the rushes, ie unedited film that I've shot so far, to my class, with the sound I found yesterday playing in the background: and, when the lights went off, there it was, a film, with little funny bits where people laughed - people laughed! It was a shock and a thrill - my film, existing so solidly, so believably, that I could use it to make a roomful of people chuckle. And Mike - he's meant to be the teacher - says it's a beautiful film. So. You'll notice on the tape that the tree poem has been changed a little - and it's different when it's spoken. But I like the tickle - there's something sexy about it, and I like the thought of light and/or warmth tickling the nerves - it is very much the same thing as tickling a child, but sometimes children are delighted - and I like the fact that the whole bawdy process happens on a scale so tiny that it is invisible and almost insensible. If you think of it as a sexy tickle and a playful tickle as well as a tiny, fragile, hardly-there tickle I think it still has depth, and it makes the poem less pedantic. Tick-kle. A little silky click in the retinal nerve; in the tiniest nerve on the end of my toe when I'm sitting in front of the fire. - I've written another little poem since them, it's maybe not to your taste but I'll send it anyway - next page. 2nd of February
[undated notebook] [notes on Goddard weekend] Anna Magdalena Bach Stroud 1969 Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach when I suddenly found myself very unwell and it was not known whether it would lead to an evil consequence Stands by the window as his death is recounted, hand on the sill He recovered his sight and could even support the light, three hours later he was taken by apoplexy and fever, and died. [notes on Felix Green Vietnam film, probably Inside North Vietnam 1967] Anger, bitterness - had seen an idyllic vision of love, cooperation, struggle, simple childish bodies, pretty legs, their hand industries, his affection for them - anger that we can't struggle without enemies, simplicity of Green. Feeling the whole group ironical at his awkwardness, they read the film corruptly while trying to get a bearing on what it is. It is through error that --- Lies - truth Angry because it worked. 'Realist conventions' and their breakdown seem peripheral to our lack of that united life. Touching us. What does it mean? Conditioning is not only bourgeois surely. Indentification, fascination. Surely we want more of them. Sense of the left lobe of the dialectic. We can take it for granted, right let's get on with the synthesis. Robin [Wood] green hat, recurring false position of asking him for the official line. [notes on Pravda] You don't identify with the characters, but with the enterprise. Seminar - how they look - her nervous smile, ashamed, Christine. The individual developing skill in reading everything. Ivens and Green: Straub, Pravda. Vivre sa vie. Film overdetermined by the situation in which it is seen. Assumption that pleasure is soporific vs Reich. [notes on Vent d'est] [notes on Tout va bien] Materialist fiction? Not at all. Being female in such a gathering. Bodies more prominent. The porter's interest. My costume, others. Hair, a lot of shiny combed hair. How much is it that we don't notice their costumes - Robin [Wood]'s green hat Bovver boy, teachers' neat jackets, suede desert boots. Drab colors. The timid smiles at Mark Nash and Sam when I was playing at the piano and singing, which gave me confidence to continue. They in the film represent the filmmaker Making a film in that sort of situation Undercutting - why? - The boys in the tube, very young, some childish and beautiful, others already adolescent ugly, some very smartly dressed. Teasing each other. Bright. Douglas Lowndes' white light radiance his white hands with their authoritative flash - we lean our shoulders together and I have a nice shiver, Peter's watching carefully, brings Douglas up when we talk later, he appropriates his friend's attraction into himself, look this is part of me - I felt robbed when he introduced me to Sam wild man in the way he did. The way last night's seminar made me use words I didn't know how to pronounce. Intoxication. Seeing a movie twice, one after the other, what is the difference. The sheer newness, unexpectedness adds an energy - that removed, what's left. In Tout va bien. Skill in construction, doubleness, reference, relation or poverty Roy's nastiness on the telephone, slams out because I'm saying something that doesn't flatter him, ie that sometimes I want to be sheltered from him. Nobody talks about the dynamic - jolting effects - arousal - the wall. A body as roots of the head, like a carrot, head being roots of the body leafing out. - Pleasure of having "humanitarian idealist bourgeois" values questioned. - Luke's laugh of pleasure, like a baby's crow, when there's me on the telephone - surprise, delight. - Young man on roller skates Euston Road, japán and red shoes, striped hat, appears in the crowd. - Nobody talks much about our physical relation to a film, its colors, pace, the excitement of shocks, us as bodies reacting - that's the politics of ecstasy - vs the ecstasy of politics. [undated journal] Gifts. Peter giving me dinner, his beautifully cooked steak, salad, decaffinated coffee, Port Salud. When he'd drunk some wine he hugged me in the kitchen and said "I've only been in love three times in my life and one of those times was you," made me almost cry; but then when he said "You never write a letter, or a postcard in which you don't use some word as no one else would use it" my stomach went on fire with joy and excitement. Being in bed with Tony, and then on Monday morning making coffee and looking out the window with him, at the reflections on the façade opposite, at the two icy white clouds rocketing down toward us, spreading, deepening, diffusing at the edges, taking on internal shadows and then just overshooting us. I was happy, full of tenderness: full of talk, ideas for films. The [Camden] Institute class laughing at the funny bits in my film; the birds' sounds coming so clearly through the noise of the pool into my microphone - the pleasure of leaning closer and farther with the microphone, dancing it to the water and back into the corner, down the drain under the shower. After the yoga class last night, the prickles in my skin, and talking to that French girl who spoke so poetically about women - "Attends " - and I was able to speak so well to her. The map of the Sahara from John Frick. Letter from Joe. Dream last night in which rows of cherry trees stood on either side of a road, tall as poplars, winter-bare, with deep red cherries hung in the black branches. A strange dream that didn't feel like mine. Luke asleep in my arms when I carried him in, he felt so long and relaxed across my chest from shoulder to hip. The ways I'm not a warrior, little doubts, guilts, hesitations, like the window cleaner who got 50p for cleaning my windows, 10 minutes for which I worked nearly an hour (how mean and resentful I felt)(he asked a pound); my unwarriorlike body, my confusion with Roy, stupidities with Luke (absent minded babytalk - but not much - we went through the sea book and he asked in detail about all the pictures), fatigue, boredom - can't think or gather myself, like last night when I went to bed at 8 until first Roy and then Jud (I found my hand clamped to the receiver) had long conversations with me. The window cleaner shook me. I was embarrassed and helpless with him - middle aged man. - Woke in the morning with a rhyming couplet in my head:
Mike saying "Give us a hug at least" and I hold him tight around the shoulders: I'm so much bigger than him and can feel him shudder like a car with its engine running. Margaret, where I went with my collected works; she liked my fairytale. Meeting Beverley at the door of the Slade. She said "I'm glad to see you." We were first into the Physics Theatre. I hesitated to let her find a place. She waited with me. Were we both waiting for Keith? Who came next. He said "I got your telegram, did you get my letter?" as if it were no secret. That provoked me to say "It was a funny letter, it reminded me of letters I used to get when I was about twelve, from penpals; it was full of exclamation marks," sharply, but because, when he came in we looked at each other until my eyes flicked with shyness - strong look. I was saying: what do you know then? Sat next to him waiting for Le petit soldat, in the suspense of the story, circling through Geneva endlessly in cars, the gasping suspense of the scene in which he photographs her, asks her questions. I looked at Joscelyn leaning forward, Beverley hunched up, Keith leaning forward, loved them all. There was some momentary contact along a sleeve, but Keith jumped back; I was just turning into it, opened my hands (we'd both sat with our arms crossed over our chests, side by side, I unclenched on purpose to be able to send something), laid them on my knees. At the end he left - when he turned I think just flashed me a look. There I was islanded, Beverley gone on the other side. Walked out to find them together in the foyer, but couldn't join them out of shyness, went out, feeling ridiculous, wanting only to go back to them but went home - then went back, from the lights, circled but they were gone. Felt foolish and helpless, with no arts. Came to tell Margaret it's time to stop being dilettantish. She might tell me how. She said oh she's been longing to fall in love for two days too. Talking about cancer, how it's a moral disease, we each connect it superstitiously to our central conflict: hers about the actor's lying larynx, mine about being strong and brave, not letting yourself be stolen. Also about breaking a child's spirit. - Showing her my poems - she said kindly "remind me of the best of Robert Frost" - raised my doubts about my style and beyond that my LM Montgomeryish sensibility. What's wrong with that LM Montgomery Robert Frost nature spirituality? It's not in fashion. Beyond that: is it really too easy? Is it false, really? The voice in this journal, sometimes it seems false to me, and that's when it's weak, maybe I'm not really in touch, making words. But why should I trust myself only when I'm being cautious, it's a way of losing myself. C/f Colin, Tony vs John Rowley, who I'm evoking these days to talk to me. Maybe the answer is to work harder and more immediately, like the writing last night, which circled like Godard, curtly. Who am I talking to. Am I really going to love Keith, because if I am, it will be harder than anything since Roy and anything before that, or would be, if it had a chance - but - as I'm saying to Peter - since I'm 1. a cripple and 2. a raving feminist, how can I offer myself to anyone. - Rang Tony in tears, Saturday afternoon, "Oh you poor sausage" he said. Arrived at his house - "Can I come late this evening and sleep with you?" - and sat in front of his fire until we went to bed; there his cold velvety hands, ah, we just stroke each other all over, everything we can reach, tiny pressures to press us together, our stomachs warm, our skin warms, way down in the bottom of the bed our feet warm, little kisses, brief and breathless because we both have colds and can't breathe through our noses. My body's intelligence pleases me, we're graceful and attentive. His hands like a cat on a picket fence. My hair is soft and springy, he crushes it with his long hand, I stroke the narrow bit of his back where the spine cuts in deep, as if pulling him, pressing him into me, what an adventure, every little movement so interesting and original, his prick pushes a little, pushes more, I'm coaxing it in, and we collide at the bottom, at the top, we dance around it, what a top to spin on, what a maypole, we slide on it, it's not his it's ours, slowly, parting, joining, but simply, because it's too new for variation. I warm and liquefy, he's uncertain when he comes, thinks he should have waited, but I'm just right. When he goes to sleep I bring myself and something happens that just happens rarely and specially: my clitoris becomes fiery and sharp, sending warmth to the ends of my fingers, I can feel it radiating. Then I go to sleep. In the morning wake before Tony, get up and dress, look at the rain, after a while go back to wake him, he huggles me and we talk as we often do in mornings, very gay together. He strokes my breast as we talk, then he begins to stroke my nipple under my sweater, and I'm silenced, he puts his hand under the sweater and strokes the tip of my breast through the undershirt. I begin to rock with it so that my bum presses against his penis as he stokes, rocking. He says "Come to bed," I get my big handkerchief out of the next room, blow my nose, take off my clothes and roll onto him. The tip of his penis is wet and slippery, he butts at me, pushes in, pushes in, long slow strokes, my knees on either side of him, pull me wide open, he just slides - then we slide back and forth on it end to end. Pressing. I hold myself strong on the end of the sheet. Get up, cook breakfast, work hard cleaning his windows, rain streaks them. Nice moments when he or I are outside, the window shut, rubbing the glass, the other inside pointing out streaks. Band next door, soft beat, just right. He painted his fireplace silver, we played with the aluminum paint in turpentine, watching explosions and currents: surface tension. When he spit into it, an eye was created, in which the eyeball spun up to the surface and down around, steadily narrowing. Little anuses that just sucked shut, almost taking us with them. The cat nested in a coil of extension cable. I loved looking at him today, long legs, standing on a chair, expertly painting the wall, pointed feet, eyes clear, swollen mouth; sitting in a restaurant with the scarf on, pink shirt, black trousers, jean jacket, Napoleon coat, bush of dry sparse hair, a joli laid, oh joli lay that you are Tony Nesbit! Gave im the small flattering letter, pleased him. He said that in his childhood Sunday was the day for cleaning and fixing, he had to clean his dad's shoes and vacuum the stairs and he hated it, but then there was a special Sunday tea, with jelly and sweets. His fierce grandmother. What a nice man he is, he says he's never been in love is that why? I'm easy and funny with him, he likes me, we sing up and down the stairs. In the morning when we get out of bed I find myself whistling Lord Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing and he joins in. Scene for movie - she's just getting out of bed, camera moves round to her, she puts on a few things, goes out of the room, camera sees someone still sleeping, looks at him carefully and affectionately, moves past to look out the window at the sort of day it is, slowly, comes back and looks at the room, halts to look at various things, both for textural interest and information. Meanders back, you hear her come in, she's waking him up, he smiles, they talk about her dream, he begins to stroke her and silence again, they are obviously just petting. Camera moves on, then jogs back and does the same movement but this time she's standing pink cheeked whistling Lord Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing and he's washing his prick, she give him a little feel and tells him a joke, he tells one back, they have coffee or something on the mantlepiece, they're sharing a cup. Cut to street, slogans, flower seller, go to see Mari who is interviewed about work. The human fly goes by glaring, camera cranes after him, stares at plastic flower lady, others on tube, reflections, voice over some of this. Cut to the window, a sound of car arriving, she goes out, camera moves sideways to window, watches exchange of many goods, toy car, bags of clothes, miscellaneous funny things, finally the sleeping child, then she hugs him a long hug, they look up to some window, she turns and comes in, he drives off, sound cut by door closing. Camera turns back to little boy asleep on the couch, she comes and takes his shoes off, coat, covers him. [undated notebook] Pangaea the first landmass. Laurasia and Dondwanaland Earth's magnetic field has reversed many times, created by the core of the earth acting as a dynamo What was the first animal to bear a live young one? where all had been eggs. Pouched and placental mammals. Apart from fragmentary evidence of a man-like mammal called Ramapithecus dating from 14 million years ago, there is a gap in the record till Austalopithecus 5 m years ago. When it was really cold, alpine flowers, reindeer, and Arctic foxes flourished in Europe. But when the ice-sheets retreated hippopotamuses swam in the Thames, and lions ranged as far north as Yorkshire. We are homo sapiens sapiens. In northern Iraq a Neanderthal burial on a bier of pine boughs and wild flowers. In another two adults buried head to head. Two children buried at a woman's feet, two a little further away. Our history is very short. Denmark, an Iron Age head preserved in a bog for 2000 years, strangled. The Sumerian statues with huge eyes, hands clasped. Ishtar Babylonian goddess of love and battle The World We Live In Galaxies 'collide', ie pass through each other, "so widely scattered that probably none will collide." "Their gases glow red from the heat of impact of molecules." Probably all the galaxies were created at about the same time. Clouds of dust - 16 atoms per cubic inch About 5 billion years ago. Seems no time at all. - Myth - Levi-Strauss Myths brought together, vertical and horizontal readings. Binary oppositions: negation as structure of our language. L-S has myths as efforts to reconcile us to unbearable oppositions, that's the hidden message. "Hold in paradox." Mythemes - individual events Overrating/underrating of blood relationship - ie inversion. Eg 1. Oedipus marrying Jacosta, Antigone burying her brother 2. Oedipus killing his father Authochthonic - creatures born of the earth 3. denial that we're autochthonic, killing monsters 4. persistance of knowledge of autochthonic origin - trouble walking Low says - we shouldn't analyze a single case, but a lot of them. Look for structures of modern mind. Irrational primitive logic, rational logic Nature is to culture as gods are to man. Stories with identical structures that can be seen to be identical when the positive/minus signs are changed. There is no Ur-version, the myth in all its versions. The Western - all the versions. Transformations Freud - categories Levi-Strauss collectivity, primary structures of human discourse. Barthes - proletariat and bourgeois Irresolvable contradictions - like that, if society is to go on, mothers and sons must be disloyal and murderous toward their parents. Myth is bundles of relationships Two kinds of time synchronic and diachronic Time in myths is reversible or unreversible Chord of myth - bundles of relationships vertically A relationship is the unit of myth - The sign when seen as part of the metalanguage (the signifier) is called FORM, the signifier is called CONCEPT Intention, usage, time, place: context situation In this way as part of metalanguage original sign is deformed, emptied Myth robs, empties in this way Function of mythology is to transform history into nature Dream has manifest and latent meaning Myth - both are manifest and The relation which units The concept of myth to its MEANING is one of Deformation Myth robs language - ie robs manifest for latent World comes out of myth harmonized - language depoliticized. -
language and myth two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation, springing from the same basic mental activity, a concentration and heightening of simple sensory experience Cassirer Language and myth both formed when something exciting happens in the not-self. 1. logical, discursive process of synthetic supplementation. A single perception, expanded by viewing in more and more relationships. Genera and species. 2. mythic thought - "mental view is distilled to a single point ... the particular essence found and extracted which is to bear the special accent of 'significance' ... everything that lies outside these focal points of verbal or mythic conception remains 'unmarked' because, and in so far as, it remains unsupplied with any linguistic or mythic 'marker.'
Language does not belong exclusively to the realm of myth; it bears within itself, from its very beginning, another power, the power of logic. Words reduced to conceptual signs. There is one intellectual realm in which the word not only preserves its original creative power, but is ever renewing it; a sort of palingenesis, at once a sensuous and a spiritual reincarnation .... The spirit lives in the world of language and in the mythical image without falling under the control of either ... mind uses the sensuous forms of word and image as "organs of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own self-revelation." Barthes - myth as depoliticized speech ie reality emptied of history and filled with 'nature' ie a self-evident clarity. "Things appear to mean something by themselves." "All the ambiguity of myth is there: its clarity is euphoric." Men do not have with myth a relationship based on truth, but on use. They depoliticize according to their needs. In order to gauge the political load of an object one must never look at things from the point of view of the signification, but from that of the signifier, the thing which has been robbed. Says the only language which is not mythical is the language of action, 'man' as a producer. The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth. Holding as a principle that man in a bourgeois society is at every turn plunged into a false Nature, it attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships, the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. Also, the mythologist cuts himself off from all the myth-consumers, and this is no small matter .... When a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter that the mythologist must become estranged if [s/he] wants to liberate the myth. Wine is objectively good, and at the same time, the goodness of wine is a myth ... mythologist deals with the goodness of wine, not with the wine itself .... In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things). The fact that we cannot manage to achieve more than an unstable grasp of reality doubtless gives the measure of our present alienation; we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still mystified. It would seem that we are condemned for some time yet always to speak excessively about reality. This is probably because ideologism and its opposite are types of behavior which are still magical, terrorized, blinded and fascinated by the split in the social world. And yet, this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge. Last page of Mythologies. - Kinship - gifts of people to each other - all kinship groups have women exchanged between men. She says this makes her reproductive and nurturing roles her means of production. Principle of contradictions: eg social definitions of male and female resolved in order to enter new contradictions. Language: sorts of social relationship not class or kinship, social relationships within labour nexus - difference between societies in which production is related to wealth or subsistence - without wealth, women are not excluded from power and therefore reproduction is as valued as production, ie reproduction not used by production. Scarcity. Reproduction of social human beings important in itself and not as part of labour, production. [undated journal] Recurring suspicion that I'm light-weight, not really trying. Doris Lessing makes me feel that, especially her. The scent of hyacinths next to the bed. Black cat point-eared on the mantlepiece, got the Moroccan and Afghani necklaces red above him. That dried tulip is shaking in the down draft to the fire, it's a stiff star on dried bleached stalk. The top of the pither is throwing circles of reflected light on the front of the fireplace, cut in half by the mantle's shadow. The smell of hyacinths. Where's Greg. The tulips on the green box borrow the scent, they're half open, behind them my little man holds open his arms. The Devon pitcher is like a bulb shooting up all four of the tulips. Authority is lacking. I'm not ambitious enough. It hasn't entered my
head to be. Wonder how that could be planted. Could manage some successes
and ask to be told. Need that. Peter saying I'm a writer, "Don't know
how you're going to find that out; maybe you'll just have to make some bad
films." I thought, oh yeah ? - we'll see.
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