6 December 2016
Bitterly cold today. So bright I kept thinking it was Sunday. At nightfall
the lingering tender sky of winter.
now I find out what mate is. and find the deep fright of the rival
and what I'd do is - refuse to fight.
Such a wince of pain seeing myself imagine marrying J.
- It was so wrong yes
- Because I wasn't capable yes
- Not because she was wrong yes
- Because I couldn't be confident in it
yes
- So was she right to contempt me
yes
- I was better with Tom YES
- Was she actually willing at that point
yes
roy on the telephone
Just then Roy says he's not sending Luke back.
a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge
of the tide, just at the end of evening
Edge of tide, end of evening, is it more than that. The edge of a tide
flutters. A moth or a certain moth - seeing it pale against dim - but no,
rare has to be there. But just rhythm? A certain pale moth. Yes.
But also 'rare fluttering', the r's. Yeats.
our daily thought was certainly but the line
of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea
- Is his intuition right YES
- Can you give me the word an activity
- A different speed? lace in the cortex
- Yes yes
- Can it be done in film yes
I look at that, luminous sea and the lace of foam, and feel a welling
in the solar.
in talking we were dead and don't interest each other with that horror
of a marriage game done
- Did we go dead on each other because we failed a test
no, exhaustion
r said you're not in love. I said I'm not but I will be.
Her jealousy wanting to harm us. A good answer. I meant attachment happens.
we're thinking about whether I'm going to die
- Was that sabotage no
- What Joyce said, her fear yes
- Did she want me to die yes
- Do you mean as her female self no
- Anger no
- Wanting to be free of me no
- Instead of her YES
- She was afraid of death because of Keder
yes
- She made me feel the fear instead of feeling it herself
yes
- Not the last time she did that yes
- That's evil yes
others when they look at you may think you have everything but inside
you're empty
everything in your life so far has been like floating but now it
will change. it has been ... false
- Are those true no
- Was he flattering my hosts no
a crack tick in the air nothing around it
Didn't realize it had begun that far back.
- Same as in San Diego yes
- Is it psychological no
- Does it happen when no one is there
no
- Is it an interaction yes
- Of body field and place yes
- Have to be an intense state no
- Anything more you can tell me no
7
Twenty centigrade degrees of frost this morning. The verandah hasn't
kept it out, the geranium's leaves are crisp and the squash on the floor
are so cold they will probably go mushy. Doug and Gail's bedroom window
has frost plants on it. 8:30 and the sun isn't up yet.
I asked if you'd watch out for me if I go underground and make sure
I come back
What was I afraid of. The metaphor gave me too believed a picture.
- Was I in danger of losing my bearings
no
- I was afraid of what I wdn't be able to get to until
Joyce yes
child dream of falling headfirst into earth
and that was dying easy and good. I felt myself go.
Two child dreams I'd remembered, one of dropping into the ground in the
field below the house's hill, just head first entering the ground. The other
of seeing an animal in its burrow, a rabbit I think.
- Prebirth memory yes
maddening roy, his unmatchable quality at the same time as his outrageous
brutality and selfishness, how he got his power and what he did with it,
dazzling performance to make me ambitious to grow - inspiring - and I thought
of madeleine too, her invention intervention as a continuing recurring
reminder of a way to be not held in, obedient, scared and conscientious.
the difficulty was the way I could see both of them not remembering like
a stunning beautiful brain damage.
It's a good summary. Power by impulse, impulse without overview. I'm
not in that conflict anymore, why. I've had power with overview, impulse
with overview. Integration.
of mother: she is a little crazy
- Do you think that was already true in 1978
yes
- Denials yes
she arrived as if an apparition, saying the key, give me the key.
- She was staggering because I was attacking her platform
yes
a creature in the air, snowy owl, heavy fluff.
there's another in the water, a beautiful strange thing with whorls on
its head like a swiss chard seed. we are looking at the one in the water
with sympathy. the one in the air plunges down and grabs the water one
by the nape, bites, shakes, tries to cut through the neck, drops it on
the ground, is in the air heavy with water. the one on the ground writes
a note to us in water that turns rainbow colored, ends it with a dashed
line toward the underbrush and rushes in its direction. when the snowy-owl
creature comes again we are sympathetic to both. this happens at the creek.
the writing, the quick rainbow sign, is to ask us to follow.
It's a beautiful account of the time.
relation with the world is originally relation to a person
- Do you think that's true yes
- She wasn't crazy yet when I was little
YES
- Is it universal yes
- Early love yes
joyce. coming into the room exposed and helpless. luke. tears. yes
and it is me. she is the witness and will be given what j isn't brave enough.
strangeness of seeing her mistakes and being patient with them, she's not
brilliant and has tricks. '... first thing that comes up is the most incomplete
shape.' the child sent away.
Yes.
t said 'your lost identity attracts'
My identity wasn't lost, or at least not more than hers. I was out of
my context and it was hostile of her not to acknowledge that.
- Did she want it to be lost? yes
the sense that I have such an amount of wrongness to discover in
myself
I don't know anything, I am no direction and don't know or love my
existence
The terrific pain in London made me look the way I do in that photo.
I'd never looked so glamorous.
- Was it pain that made me beautiful?
no
- Vulnerability yes
- Sex? NO
- Just emotion yes
- It was amazingly rocky but those months before I went north were a
real love affair. She was in it as much as I was. We were both on our absolute
edges. I shouldn't turn it into less than that.
8
I ignore all the esoteric notes with no uncertainty.
- Were they useless yes
- So they were a waste no
- It's that I've fulfilled them yes
- Asking in the context of Yeats and Richardson, Richardson's raptures
that get exhaustedly repetitive, Yeats' burgeoning fantasy to keep up creative
energy. Richardson keeps saying 'joy,' 'light,' 'depth,' 'space,' ineffablizing,
abstractly insisting. Yeats patches together a tight system that somehow
supports lyric looseness.
There's quite a lot of suspense in Richardson, which sometimes has to
do with whether Miriam is so-cerebrally getting it wrong. One of the things
I was asking myself as I was reading vol IV was whether writing those later
volumes as she was aging isolated in the sticks in Cornwall her energy was
giving out. Were those labyrinthine sentences natural to her or did she
confect them. She hadn't finished March moonlight and it's an assembly
of short sentences, notes, lighter. By that time the interest is on how
she's going to get to Alan and her first book. But all through it's interest
in what a life is, hers and mine. She's a ponderous know-it-all and when
she tells how popular she is I sometimes feel it's to counteract an overbearing
impression. There's her microscopically close social attention to voice
and facial change - her reading for instance of concealment in the tiny
moment before uttering a sentence - can she really do that?
A ponderous sentence isn't really a sentence of female consciousness.
VW's are a voice women can use to know what they know: Anna's thesis. Hers
aren't a voice in the same way, they are abstract scaffolds like
continental phenomenology. She's still having to prove she's as smart as
a man. It's not egotism as VW said, it's protest she didn't know was on
the way to being unneeded.
Yeats like VW had a cultivated family. When I was younger I loved DR
for being self-made and describing how the making went in ways I could recognize.
Do I love her less now. I have less use for her. I want writers who can
lead me into the lighter magics of aristocratic assurance - isn't that it?
(Sigh.)
9
It snowed overnight, half an inch of loose glitter.
I've combed DR6-8, N1-6, E1-8 and will begin going through the extracts.
I'll see different impulses. In art I don't know how to have settled intent,
I have moments of hopeful belief that I lose almost immediately. In philosophy
I had huge firmness I held through twelve years, I knew what I was doing.
I'm not really an artist, it means. And yet there's something to be made
of wanting to be. It's some kind of matrix. I can precipitate something
out of the dissolve.
- 1. lyric shreds
- 2. self-formation struggle
- 3. the air
- 4. ether space
-
- Do you understand why I lose confidence in projects
yes
- I just forget them yes
- It's from childhood, we didn't do that, we did school
yes
The Venus story grabbed me - sex, ritual, design - and the morning after
moonlight. Rain and new-leaf ritual in the red bathrobe. The love book.
Drawings of the kids, houseplans. "You could draw and you could sing."
The skating poem, the Lavanii story. Stories for Judy. Impulse but no context.
- Is that the whole of it no
- I had huge firmness about the garden
yes
- My unc somehow doesn't believe in art projects
yes
- Is that something I can correct
no
- On account of my dad yes
- That he didn't take pleasure in me
yes
- That's the root YES
- There I find Luke's poem.
- Is it worth studying what happened with Jam
no
- Just look for what still holds yes
half a dozen lines a day
- Yeats at Coole. Following a prose draft.
10
Wake too early, wake in fiery black-skin pain, anxious about food because
I'm five pounds over, anxious about money because since it's got cold the
boiler has to run most of the day and even into the night, sad for lack
of beauty at the windows, confined by fear of the winter roads, utterly
alone since I'm not spending money on labor, curbed by the Mac Pro seeming
to be failing, thwarted by Merritt's resourcelessness, disillusioned in
any sort of cultural action, afraid of physical work that will make me sore,
at a stop not knowing what to work on, hopeless that anyone wants my work
already given, dimly haunted by Mary in her relentless unthinkable hell,
mostly ashamed of my clothes, displeased by the mess of the garden, appalled
by US politics, at loose ends evenings since the Powerbook won't play dvds
anymore, completely wasted in general, etc.
But: the jeep's new battery makes sure it starts in the cold. Am still
it seems able to write a firm thoughtful paragraph, not too heavy. Sometimes.
And have better times saved up for when there's nothing else.
- There I went out and swept and shoveled a couple of inches of dry powdery
snow fallen overnight.
The qualities that make a man succeed do not
shew in his work, often for quite a long time. They are much less qualities
of talent than qualities of character - faith (of this you have probably
enough), patience, adaptability, (without this one learns nothing), and
a gift for growing by experience & this is perhaps rarest of all. I
will do anything for you I can but I am afraid that it will not be a great
deal. The chief use I can be, though probably you will not believe this,
will be by introducing you to some other writers who are starting like yourself,
one always learns one's business from one's fellow-workers, especially from
those who are near enough one's own age to understand one's own difficulties.
Yeats to Joyce when Joyce was maybe 21.
I like it for more than one reason. It's what I saw at [my college],
not one of the students I could see were talented - except Logan? - not
one of the women - or maybe Sonja? - had character that could bring them
further. And second, neither I nor my cohort could do what he and his cohort
did, talk and collaborate and organize and give each other reviews and publishing
placements. And third, faith is what I do not have.
My work has got more salt in it.
when I was not seeking beauty at all but merely
to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness thrown upon it
by the events of life
It's his prose I like. There's a lot of lucid grace around him, Irish
voices, his family's letters, but he adds some flare of intuition that seizes
me.
13
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14
Cold, jeep won't start. Money, $150 gift card for books from Emilee,
$500 from David. advertised as a tutor on the Merritt billboards. Sent for
a new black cashmere sweater because this one is in rags, nice pyjamas.
Confined, sore.
-
DR5 January-April the months before Jam. What am I looking for, what
can I be looking for. Three people at full stretch. What kind of people.
Thirty two, strong, hungry, smart, educated, in rebellion against male dominance,
in a transition zone, at an age when they needed to establish themselves
in work, claim a place. Three people in the same place in their time. Women
whose mothers were discredited as women and no help. We were all three going
for broke. Sexually at sea just when we were burning. Given up on men because
we were discredited there. We were coming out of ten years of increasing
feminist rebellion. Feminist rebellion, drugs, art, therapy, early adulthood
with its strength, beauty, daring and energized hope. I don't like this
sociological sound but I'm wanting to know what happened to me then. because
it shocked me and disordered me.
They're women and so their way of going for broke is in erotic struggle.
Is that the best way to do it? They are trying to change themselves instead
of changing their circumstance. They need to adore, they need to be adored,
they short-circuit.
- Do you understand it YES
- Were they mistaken yes
- They should have been clawing their way into the world
yes
- But they're stuck trying to remake their mothers
yes
- Looking for an impossible intimacy
yes
- Did I know anyone who was doing it right
no
- Is there a right way to mate yes
- We were trying to mate as children
yes
- Do you think of them as heroic yes
- And lost yes
- So was it all wasted time no
- What was it good for bringing forward
love woman's subtlety and energy
- Strengthening non-patriarchal girlness
yes
- Gilligan yes
the texture of repression is, when you look back, noticing a blankness
in a certain spot
in the stone, the sense of fullness of erotic turn-on, the balance,
a humorous centre, something rich and confident
Drugs and therapy. The notion of repression brought alive, seeing where
there had been a blank. Seeing there could be more in sex than there had
been. Experiencing state change from one moment to the other. Being dumped
into deep uncertainty.
why can't I talk to t and c - the wipe-out is more than personal.
it is that something there doesn't have a possibility of me.
- It was about generosity YES
- They had tighter spirits? yes
- Was it cultural no
- What Louie said about teaching yes
16
it shocks me what a dream I've lived in. what I saw was this: there
is no disguising it. it's a spoiled body. it's all there but part of it
works just to support the other side during steps. the pubic triangle skews
oddly. it's so beefcake, so not like their elegant boybodies, so mature
in its heaviness. but likeable, not immoral, erect. it was nobody I'd seen
before, not my mother, not my father. the thing it's hard for me to know
what to do with is that it should be there as part of the picture of me
for everybody who sees me.
I've cleaned it up. What I wrote at the time was messed up by falsity
and exaggeration. Rereading it last night I was there again dismayed by
what had become of me, horrified by what I have to be in the world. Like
dropping into a pit.
- Was it a mistake to do that no
- It spoiled my confidence no
- It confirmed my confidence that I could handle it you
mean yes
- Is there anything you want to say
exclusion, come through, to friendship, and recovery
- Seeing I couldn't hide it yes
- But I lost that shining face no
- It did come again yes
There have only been two people who dealt with it as what it is for me
not what it is for them, Trudy and Tom. Both saw it instantly.
- Even Joyce got it wrong yes
- She underestimated me because of it
YES
- It took her years to see me yes
- When Tom saw it he saw my strong spirit
yes
- When Trudy saw it she saw my pain at being spoiled
yes
- Cheryl saw it as her own wrongness
yes
- Jam didn't see it because she was seeing her mother
yes
- Louie has never seen it, why because
of a social faking habit
- Luke doesn't see it because I seduced him
yes
"Affection without understanding" - I didn't know it was about
me too, that being loved without being known can be worse than useless,
it can seduce me into a false position.
after acid - chinese paintings - persian paintings - clear outlines
and the sense of color. a few things seen in the clearest light.
- Did you like acid yes
- It corrected something yes
- Was it dangerous YES
- Did it damage my brain no
the mind makes the body
Body was making the mind that thought so but yes small alterations in
neurochemistry were making a body that moved differently, sensed differently,
felt differently. Remarkable.
- Was it an experience of true self
yes
- Free speed yes
- Which means it corrected training
YES
- Could it correct trauma yes
- Is it good to be that interested in being
yes
how can he have such harmonious handwriting? [my dad] beautiful,
in charge and bare.
- Handwriting shows an essence? yes
- Did he feel unknown all his life
YES
when you come to a strange place you take possession of yourself
in it. you look around to see what you can see. you don't indulge in confusion.
you choose who to be. you see what calls you and you choose your good self
and then you find yourself unafraid and you give what you can.
Pretty much perfect conclusion.
woke from a dream very afraid. I'd had a vision of evil powers. I
can't get back the sense of what they were, didn't dare think about it.
it was a subtle evil. it was an evil of a certain kind of consciousness,
some way of thinking.
- It was fear yes
- Just that yes
-
- Was Joyce right to dislike me yes
- Will you say why despair, slow growth,
intellectuality instead of recovery
- Fair enough yes
-
- Kandinsky about 1911
- New York School 40s and 50s
- Color field painting 60s and 70s
What's my question about painting then - I hate most of it but a few
pieces are sublime sublime - what were they doing and why - it changed perception
- what kind of life was it - if I pick up a hobby art mag in the library
I whip through bored with everything though it may all be expert - Cassandra
has some strong paintings but they're not impressive - the best of the abstracts
seem heroic - I also hate the contemporary high end stuff - it's just that
period - it's progressive - interested in uncon - uses drugs - sexually
liberal - 1948 'new liberalism' Truman freedom, risk, humanism - Black Mountain,
existentialism -
-
I crept across the icy road to St Michaels hall for their carol evening.
Their priest the unhappy-looking man I saw back and forth in front of my
window in shorts all summer was wearing a cassock for the occasion and followed
the BBC version of the service of carols and readings. We were ranged sideways
down the room on stacking chairs, not more than thirty of us in front of
an artificial tree, but I had the impression he was feeling himself to be
in a lineage of blazing cathedral Christmases. Apart from him there were
only three men and only three women under fifty. Those three were young
girls in pretty dresses. One of them stumbled through the hymns on the piano,
one stumbled through a flute accompaniment, and the third stood in front
of us through the songs for some reason. Lessons were mostly read by stout
grey-haired women. I didn't sing except once, couldn't want to put my voice
into the harsh tangle around me. The woman behind me screeched each syllable
separately so I had to notice how badly fitted the words were to the tunes.
The readings were not in the King James version and I wondered whether the
hymns have been bowdlerized too. In the bleak midwinter / frosty wind
made moan / earth stood hard as iron / water like a stone / snow had fallen,
snow on snow / snow on snow / in the bleak midwinter / long ago - that
was good. Rosetti and Holst. First verses are often alright but then we
had to drag through three or four stanzas of ideology. At the end of the
evening he passed out tapers with perforated paper saucers and turned out
the lights so we could sing Silent night by candlelight. I had been
thinking of the congregation in La Glace, the room filled up with young
families, filled with beautiful sound, warmed by a live fire, scented by
a live real tree brought from someone's land, thrumming with eager lives,
suspended in huge black cold real winter night. Of midnight mass with Tom
at St Joseph's, where there was still a full cathedral - of Tom. Of stepping
into the desert courtyard to sing Silent night at St Barnabas in
Borrego. My eyes flooded, there I was crying in church again. It's my losses
I cry for but maybe not only mine. This pitiful remnant group meets in the
church hall rather than their beautiful church that must once have been
full on Christmas Eve because there are too few of them to afford to heat
the hall. They bash away singing badly without caring what they are saying.
They are led by this shabby closeted gay - he looks to me to be - rather
than a wise substantial father of the old school. I don't like patriarchal
faith but I like splendour and in a way I like worship, I like when people
honorably love together. I hold myself at a distance from their muddled
domesticized space and from everyone there, I don't fall in with them, but
when the candles and the song softened me I cried for their losses too.
16
I've picked up the TSK book and come to a halt after nearly every sentence.
It promises a transformative metaphysics and that seems possible to me.
A metaphysics suggesting a changed relation to space and time instead of
stories about divine persons makes sense but when I bring its sentences
into what I already am they don't work. What I already am dimly envisions
network effects in cortex and field effects in all-space. TSK is coming
from a Tantric meditative tradition that seems to be on the right track
but the way it's being taught may keep me from a more direct way that would
work better for me. I can see from my notes and underlines that when I was
younger I picked out sentences I recognized and rushed past everything else.
That may have been better but now I need a way to enliven myself. And I
want to get further into envisioning and maybe sensing field. It's for work,
it is work.
commanding, stalwart, effervescent, youthful,
comprehensively intimate
The book makes extraordinary promises. Just reading them has an effect.
Guided by Great Knowledge, which always keeps
up with the new challenges posed by Space and Time, and which never loses
track of Being's value throughout this varied play, we can decide and act
with complete propriety and utter spontaneity as well. All our acts will
naturally be fulfilling both to ourselves and to others.
Do I know anything about that. Is the Book great knowledge?
- Are you? yes
- The journal's a way of valuing being, art is
yes
- Is this an idealist vision yes
- Is that its flaw yes
- Can I convert its terms yes
I've sometimes acted with propriety and spontaneity, I know what it's
like to trust myself. It was in contexts where I had scope. My question
now is more how to have energy where I don't have beauty, affection or scope.
To have beauty, affection and scope where I don't have them.
compassion which reads between the lines of
conventional needs and happiness ... freedom, openness, relaxation, power,
creativity, intimacy, spontaneity, love, satisfaction and fulfillment ...
essentially a sensitivity to the value and range of space and time - and
as such, compassion is an empathy for all presentations, situations, and
realms seen in the light of the profound value which they represent and
which is accessible to them
- Should I, could I, have a different relation to an event
like last night no
- Is it tragic YES
Presence: openness, liveliness, clarity
the presenting character of time a shimmering
structuring movement in a way that nevertheless lacks structure or movement
immediacy of everything as wonderment
no ugliness or imperfection for the presence
of these is itself incomparable beauty
all being newly born within space and time minute
by minute
-
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world,
which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
Manifesto 1943 in this little book by Barbara Hess.
Exemplarily sublime. They show a way to live. Some don't look like much
at first sight but when I look longer there's a whole space.
Danger of getting lost in professional detail, not staying grounded in
wanting right human presence.
Large canvas, big galleries, reviewers.
-
the impatience of not being able to do house and child and relatives
and all because something is pressing to be done. but what.
- It was what I did with Joyce but I still feel it
yes
- 'The duty of genius,' something like that
yes
- Do you agree with it yes
- Do you agree that there's something I need to get to
in work yes
- Is it about proving something no
- It's about showing something yes
- It's not satisfied by the doc or gardens or photos or
the films yes
- Wd it be satisfied by the journal if people paid attention
to it yes
- So does it have to be 'success'
no
- It needs to be work done out of an edge I haven't opened
yet yes
17
- I went through the door that gave my mind a birth into myself, which
before had belonged to my parents, the tribe's language. I succeeded in
holding out for myself, against the first real friendship I'd had in the
world.
Yes.
- lady:
- thee:
-
- Was that you yes
I can't bear luke in this sharp place, I can't bear his interruption.
I haven't had enough real being with somebody so that I can give up the
'real' being by myself
- WAS it realness yes
- It was up against a mom state from my mom that was false
yes
as object, die
so the world will be born as light
as air
I had a sensationalizing habit. The world is already light and space.
Objects remain. But what did I mean.
- Just the subjectivizing turn of drugs
yes
"seeing you born," she said, "it takes me back to
the time it was happening for me. roy and rhoda, rhoda and I found it together."
- Was I born in some way no
- Were they no
- It was a dope delusion yes
art - this is what I think, it was simply to watch being, to see
being in me and in other things, to take on a human life in that way, to
stop giving my power to objects.
- Was that it yes
- Is it true yes
- Partially yes
it's beautiful to be allowed to see. I'm afraid of losing it and
having to go back to the dumb restless hunger for it.
when I talk to t there is a different sense of space than when I
talk to anyone - it is a sense of an equal horizontal reach; oftentimes
I feel that of what I have in me only a small amount is indirectly transmitted.
with t my forehead stands open.
Her grounded intimacy was true. She's coming out of the story well at
least in this early stage.
what stops me still is, I can't believe it. the sense of how can
anything so marvelous happen to me.
- Do you think it was marvelous yes
-
It's Luke's birthday and I can't reach him. I sent him a message last
night in what would be his early morning and he hasn't shown up. His phone
rings on and on. No new posts. Is he in Slovakia without letting me know.
Is it the first time we haven't been in touch on his birthday. I'm nervous
about what will happen if this woman betrays him.
18
the old woman is death, says c.
- That was wrong, the old woman is you
yes
It was 8 at night here and 4am in London. I wrote the paragraph above
and went to write him a note. I was anxious. He replied. He was awake, Kat
asleep beside him. Was the 778 number me he asked. He'd had a good day with
Kat. I was struck dumb with pain. I have to go I said. I wasn't sure what
the pain was about but I believed it. I have to go I said again and went.
- Do you understand it yes
- Was it about being displaced by Kat
no
- Was he lying no
- It was old pain I couldn't feel till I knew he was okay
yes
-
I said what it was like. He got into some of his old absolute statements
and I froze in hopelessness the way I do when he doesn't seem to think there
was good in anything I've been with him, but then I carefully kept going.
I don't think my crimes against him have been many but they are immense
pillars of description in his memory, it was as if I could see them closing
out his view of the whole. I thought I could see too that they belong to
a certain verbal territory that maybe is a remnant island in him now. Around
it is love.
- Thank you yes
It's Sunday, still too cold for the jeep to start. The closed-in days
have been hard to bear.
19
Monday above zero and the jeep started. There was sun and the air was
soft.
My books on order haven't arrived so I'm rereading Deadlock in
which Miriam is 25 rather than nearing 40. Its sentences are shorter and
clip along. M is still diffident but discovering herself as a talker with
Michael. He gives her short stories to translate - the whole Michael story
is wonderful - and Richardson marvelously describes her dawning into the
farther reaches of what she can do. In this volume I think R is ahead of
everyone, Woolf included, because she has wider experience and she's developmental:
portrait of someone who was threading her way among paths not all of which
would have opened into the artist she became. I know what Powys means when
he says she's writing from the female uncon: in the writing she's unpacking
what was latent - felt, sensed, decided - outside of language, conscious
but not spoken to herself. There's more happening in her head than has ever
happened in mine and yet I keep recognizing my thoughts in hers. No one
else has been able to do what she does and I keep not understanding why
writers want to do so much less. Miriam is shown writing to discover what
she is. It keeps being more than she expects. There's huge narrative suspense
in the story. And it's funny.
Phone rang last night, Rob. I turned off the light and sat in the red
chair with the little Blackberry at my ear. We nattered excitedly for hours.
He stopped twice to say he liked the way I said something, "It's a
poem," and I noticed a moment when his voice got more definite than
I'd heard it, darker, stronger.
One stalk of the amaryllis's two has put out three blaring red trumpets.
It's overdone, too big.
What to do next. I extracted from DR5 thinking it might be for Cheryl,
to remind her of how she actually was with Trudy, how T actually was, as
against the description she seems to have settled on. I think she left something
behind she should want to get back, as I did, though later and differently,
more in relation to Jam than T.
What I see in the T and C story is T's clarity and generosity and C's
struggle, in relation to me her ambivalence and probably her opportunism.
She was out of her depth with T and R it seems. I felt for her the way I
feel for orphans but also was erotically hooked in a way I can see wasn't
helpful to her.
- Hooked by her ambivalence yes
20
Bacigalupo. I hate that he condescends to Pound as if he thinks he's
larger but I can use him to think about what I want to do.
Pound prepared for writing by floods of writing. I'm seeing that one
of the ways I've prepared, if I follow through, is the sections about language
in Being about. Preparing differently I might write only one thing.
That would be fine.
For instance ideogramic method can be thought of as evoking and modifying
a network of a certain kind. It's not what I'm interested in but still.
It's like what I described for metaphor and abstraction, instance-networks
activating subnetworks. Watch the effect.
What is a life's right project?
Pound is twelve years younger than Richardson, twenty younger than Yeats.
-
Two satisfactions, Clint Reimer knocked at the door, sewing machine is
fixed, and a little spruce David Prest brought from a spot he knows at Helmer
Lake. Snow has been melting since morning.
21st, 7:35.
Pale grey-blue dawn, streets empty. There stands the blue spruce quietly.
The snow has shrunk down and will more. There stand the bare branches, the
shapes of trees. The human mess, always the human mess of badly made towns.
Oxford on Lewis, these nights watching all the series. I never
care who was the murderer, I see they're formulas, and yet there are the
colleges, the houses, the river, a town lovely at least in some of its parts.
The idea of detectives, people who move around in a town with reasons to
look and ask. Hathaway is not good looking and yet I watch him. The Brits
invent smart people well, Hathaway a skinny thing with a bare skimpy almost
expressionless head who walks like an awkward child but is full of esoteric
knowledge he comes out with in a diffident dark voice. I like Endeavour's
lonely sweetness more but I stare at Hathaway the way I stared at Tom, half-repelled.
They do the father-son thing in both shows, the sensitive son who wins the
love of the severe pragmatical honorable father. It's a hook even for me.
British murder mysteries pretexts for interest in personality and place
and class etc. They have so much more to be interested in.
I'm looking at clouds lit pink by sun still below the horizon, quite
a bit below, and not a good pink, that too-orange off-shade.
Was in bed last night thinking of times I've been alone in the world
and not minded as I do now. I don't remember ever feeling alone in the hospital.
I felt shut out at school and tense at home when Ed was there but being
away from my family felt ordinary, normal. This morning, just now, realizing
it's that I like being among people in an institution. The Golden West like
the hospital. I suffer of isolation rather than loneliness. I've liked odd
people I don't know around me.
There stands my tree with bright small lights in its arms looking as if they
belong there, as if they are the tree's aliveness, reflected on the floor
and on the varnished wainscot behind it. The Strathcona School reflective
star from Rowen's first year clipped onto the tall straight leader. The
last time it stood on a tree was at Tom's house four Christmases ago when
Tom crashed into rage and scattered me rushing home to Mesa Grande in the
dark.
22
Cambridge companion to modernism, Michael Bell's essay on modernist
metaphysics thinking of Richardson and Pound and what it is about them.
It's partly that I'm their contemporary, my Going for broke time
was their crisis it seems. It's also that for my purposes they are ahead
of me still. I disregard most of what is said to have surpassed them. I
also want to know whether I've found ways in my time to develop from them.
He says Marx, Freud and Nietzsche called out systematic fraudulence.
Capitalist false consciousness, repression and the uncon, and from Nietzsche
a diagnosis of 'the whole tradition of western metaphysics from Socrates
onwards as a subtle form of falsehood reflecting an inner suppression and
outer domination. Christianity in particular was a gigantic fraud perpetrated
by the psyche on itself.'
I've worked against specific interrelated forms of fraudulence, patriarchy
and mind-body dualism. It doesn't seem as if any of them can be prior, more
basic.
The constraints my heroes had to work within were a desperate need to
find work for their capabilities at the same time as an honorable awareness
of the fraudulence of means to hand.
Thinking of the political-cultural right wing as persons who refuse or
are unable to go through the crisis of acknowledged fraudulences. Not only
the right wing, obviously; hardly anyone in philosophy sees through either
patriarchal oblivion or mind-body dualism.
-
Clean house, Jennifer. Laundry. The HD book arrived. Gas bill
paid. The little tree. Sun at the kitchen window.
-
Reading these days is more resistant. I used to flit through picking
up twigs for my nest. Now I backtrack, refuse rather than ignore, restate.
She was testing for an affinity.
to let life use you like this, was not shameful
but heroic
This poem in itself was necessary in order for
what it evoked to be kept alive
I'm crying with his description of a moment with a young woman high school
English teacher who read a poem. Why. For the way he honors me in her and
in himself. I had teachers who loved me but none who would give me The
waves and ask to know what I made of it.
For my teacher brought me to the love of a way
of being that they had known.
its form grew in the faith or feeling of its
own being ... the pulse of it own event
23
Snowing steadily deep into the morning.
The proprioceptive grows hallucinatory, for
the proper body of the author presents itself in the surrounding scene.
That isn't the way to say it. He's talking about for instance HD and
the beach in Helen. She may be feeling herself in a network with
the imagined beach. That's an interesting thought. But it's not a hallucination,
it's partly perception and partly simulation, like many states. Hallucination
is when simulation is taken as perception. She's imagining perceiving the
beach - that's simulation - and in that simulation actually perceiving her
body but not realizing she's doing that. It's complex.
Mythos Aristotle defined as the plot of the
story. The fiction of what [human] is.
Caring becomes an adventure of the imagination.
-
I got amazingly far into London in five years. I knew Ros who became
the managing director of The Women's Press. Was at her party with Joe Slovo.
Consulted Ruth First about a painting job. Had New Years lunch with Doris
Lessing. Was invited to tea by Buddy Hardy. Invited Madge Herron to tea.
Bought David Cooper's breakfast whiskey when he lived with us. Hung out
with Lauderic Caton. Was friends with Sally Potter and borrowed her Beaulieu.
Read in the old Museum Reading Room. Read at the BFI library. Read in the
Westminster Art Library. Hitch-hiked to Paris five or six times, to the
south of France twice. Took the train to Dublin and Edinburgh and Lisbon.
Rode on the back of a motorcycle up the autobahn to was it Munich. Flew
to Morocco. Got pregnant in Oxford. Visited Dee in Cambridge. Had a baby
in the original University College Hospital. Found Dorothy Richardson in
the Kentish Town Library. Found Charlotte Mew and Stevie Smith in a poetry
group. Marched on Trafalgar Square with my consciousness raising group.
Dated a BBC documentary director. Learned breath of fire with the 3HO people
in Notting Hill. Learned to lay concrete blocks at a Sufi farm in Surrey.
Was at the first experimental film congress at the NFT. Shot a film that
is still shown. Learned to throw pots. Learned English gardening. Saw half
a dozen movies a week. Was in and out of the front door of the Slade. Was
shown the whole history of experimental film in a basement in Flaxman Terrace
where Yeats kept a studio flat across from Dorothy Richardson's window.
Took vistors for dinner at Jimmy's in Soho. Invited my legal aid solicitor
and her boyfriend to Luke's fourth birthday party. Hid out in a cold dirty
squat in Dickens' East London. Slept next to the Ladies' Pool on Hampstead
Heath. Had milk in glass bottles delivered by a horse cart I heard clopping
by early in the morning. Had coal delivered to my cellar through a pavement
hatch by Tozer and Sons. Lay in bed in a condemned terrace house in Ladbroke
Grove hearing horses in the feed store below. Walked up Highgate Road at
night with newspaper-wrapped chips keeping warm in my armpit. Owned a Deux
Chevaux without ever learning to drive. Was rained out of a women's camp
in Wales and took Luke to stay in an ancient stone cottage. Made two friends
I honorably loved, I mean Sarah and Tony. Apart from Luke, Roy and all his
messes hardly register in any of this but did they maybe keep me moving
at what seems unusual speed because he was moving at unusual speed.
- Then from all of that to Vancouver, where I was patronized by two Jewish
girls with some fraction of either my capability or my experience or my
bravery. I keep doing this, jumping to contexts where no one knows or can
imagine anything about me. Trying to carry it all with me on my own.
It's nearly midnight, Friday before Christmas. The roads are bad. I shoveled
the whole sidewalk without pain. Luke with Kat in a mountain valley in Slovakia.
24
palin + psestos again rubbed smooth - neural networks formed
and reformed, traces after erasures.
Images as germinal, point-seeds - net activators.
"Other meanings and realms within those presented" - yes I
know text can do that but I don't like that he goes on about magic, even
if technically that is what magic practices mean to do. He goes on too long
and is unclean, I mean sensationalizing mysteries. Saying 'soul' and 'imagination'
a lot and in a way that mystifies himself as 'poet'.
When I read Helen in Egypt in 1975, sleeping in the upstairs bedroom
on Eton street, I was easily taken into a mythological intoxication from
which these collages no one can look at now. When I last tried it, what
felt to be its self-conscious self-importance annoyed me. This is related
to my impatience now with the rhapsodies I wrote about C and T, in general
the way I saw gods in persons I desired.
- What do you think, is this dryness a loss
yes
- An important loss yes
- Loss of illusion no
- Loss of feeling yes
- Can there be the feeling without the illusion
yes
lamenting the mother ... wrapped round in the
illusions of the restored mother
- So the point about T and C was that they were women
yes
mediumship, poetry and homosexuality
- I was mindblown by mixing sex with the mother
yes
- I have distaste for that now yes
- It means I'm further from poetry
no
- Once having passed the frontier
YES
- It made me more mediumistic yes
- As did childbirth yes
- Only the first time yes
What he should declare to begin with and doesn't: his mother died in
childbirth; he was renamed when adopted; damaged his eyes when he was three
so he sees double, as if two overlain images; renamed himself with his original
surname after being removed from the army for declaring homosexuality.
What I remember of child myth: the little sleigh room filled with the
scent of wild roses, the dives from an imagined raft to pull up treasure
from under the sea, the room under the hill, the spring procession waving
branches with new leaves, the elf room under a spruce root, the Venus wedding
of four, imaginary boyfriends, the love book hidden under the floor, the
beautiful boyfriend afflicted with a whorl of ear wax. My mother said imaginary
sisters. None of that says anything about or from the abandoned child. That
one doesn't speak in mythic figures, it repeats in action.
There's womb memory I took account of in what will we know but
what I didn't notice was that going back to make the film was like coming
back after being in the hospital. From there I go to noticing that being
born is the first instance of being sent away alone. Does returning changed
give me an uncommon sense of there being somewhere to return to.
- Do you think yes
Gifts given by trauma have to be distrusted. Not refused but tested.
25
I was in a bed with Don, the side closest to the
wall, with my back to him and pretending to be asleep. He got out of bed
for a moment and then came back. Touched me, did I want to make love. I
didn't, or did I. He was touching my clit in a way I liked. I should touch
his penis, and do, but I'm awkward, this isn't working, I don't like it,
and we come to a stop. I like you, I say, trying to keep something going
nonetheless. I'm thinking of the way he dresses, a checked shirt showing
at his jacket cuff.
For each there was to be ahead, in the last
years of their lives, a major creative phase. "It called for a poetry
such as I did not know to discover or make such a context."
He means the Pisan cantos and Helen in Egypt as works after 60.
melodic distribution of phrases, the phrasing
allowing for melodies within a melody
Disappointed with The HD book. It so inflates Poetry and the Poet.
He took HD as his master, he says, and he has the good-enough taste to diss
Eliot, but he so goes on about the holy work of his selected band of brothers.
And he's not a prose writer, he's prolix and poses-along mercilessly. A
slog.
26
of the conspicuous young men and women, our
sexually desirable ones, whose nature it is to wax and wane and be replaced
whose beauty is no stronger than a flower
I hadn't taken account of the way in the DR years we were a certain age,
so my goddess intuitions were of us in our not prime but bloom - early thirties.
little intense groups of ephemera having their
day living off their nerves or their erotic excitement, living beyond their
means
HD seems a burnished triviality in his book, or worse a disreputable
fantasist always licking old poisons to vaporize herself. Why is he dedicating
this whole long thick work to her, what's the matter with him. - Then he
says what it is, she's a mother whose baby dies, he's a baby whose mother
dies, she's his birth mother imagined as mother of his vocation. He gets
to it on page 277 of 646.
Yesterday I read Helen Garner who wrote out of grounded generous personal
feeling. I was bored by her grandchildren but in other sections kept feeling
she's ahead of me here, she's realer and more exact.
Isn't the syllable what I was looking for in the idea of this book before
I had it, Yeats and Pound, my collected scraps, right sound, right cadence.
Instead I get him on and on as professor of hocus pocus.
no cloud, but the crystal body
I was taken with the thought of crystal structure - it was intuition
of network I'm now seeing - in Pound too.
27
Should I mention that Rowen got engaged Christmas Eve. Yes because it's
Rowen, no because what do I care about engagements.
Was thinking of the poem from grade seven or eight, why, how did I get
there, cadence in poetry maybe. Occurred to me I could post it and have.
Publish the ignored twelve year old nearly sixty years later online on facebook.
- And who has shown up, three men of the north, Adam, Russell and Jim, who
have said things that made me cry.
the poem like music taking shape upon the air
Aphrodite "takes form upon the air," "the air they have
broken up and tempered." "The air or melody."
'The air' stands in for the electromagnetic field of the cortex.
an art having the defects inherent in a record
of struggle
A god is a state of mind but not eternal. Certain kinds of.
our weaving upon the air
whose poetry had come to be a life work ...
move in their work through phases of growth towards a poetry that spreads
in scope ... as one may gather in one's face and form acknowledged accumulations
of what one is in one's life, in cooperation with the world
Sometimes when they talk about 'the invisible' they don't mean something
esoteric, they mean what they value as opposed to the dominance of what
they don't. It's a complication when the true real is given the same name
as denying fantasy. As when both corrupt culture and surviving nature are
called 'the world'.
Protestant Ethic, the very spirit of industrial
and commercial capitalism, in attack against art, sexuality and Woman
Obviously not Protestantism since it's in the other patriarchal monotheisms
too. And he's always going on about Man. He complains that Pound will have
nothing to do with Judeo-Christian deities but, one, Duncan wasn't brought
up in those icky beliefs, and two, Pound's paganism is anti-patriarchal.
Why he seized on vortices.
We might come to believe that the thing which
matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity
transfusing, welding, and unifying
a force rather like water when it spurts up
through very bright sand and sets it into swift motion
that most exquisite net at the bottom/sandy
+ pebbly river, all whose loops are wires of sunshine, gold finer than silk,
beside yon Stone the Breeze seems to have blown them in a Heap
[Pound and Coleridge]
a natural philosophy of poetry
the devotional character of the poem
28
He asks a good question, why Pound and he says Williams, Stein, etc affect
idiotic voices, Uncle Ez, regular-guy, etc. "Embarrassed before their
inspiration," "in writing to each other they cultivate this special
Man-Talk. It had its counterpart in the girlish-idiotic manner cultivated
by some women." Thinking of this in relation to Jam's repulsive chopped
English. It's her literary claim and she understands it as sophisticated
anti-colonial miscegenation but in correspondence it is like an extreme
of anal withholding: I'll give you the very minimum even of individual words.
to see the poem as a field
It's a way of imagining it as an accumulating effect rather than an object
on the page.
-
What to do with the Going for broke section. In what way to commit
to it. It's ten years, 1975-1985, thirty to forty. There's the love struggle
stream and the poetics stream and a lot of daily life and general search.
What am I looking for.
- You agree that's where I should be working
yes
- Am I making a piece of writing yes
- Rather than resolving something personally
yes
- Is there a structure YES
- Some kind of coming through yes
- Is it a novel no
- A poem yes
- A film no
- Just journal no more formed
- The only thing that matters is the brilliant bits
no
- Will you explain conflict, between
illusion, and grounded, brilliance
- Five year work one
- Show the illusions no work through
them
- The way I do with you yes
- Is that the form no
- But can form come out of it yes
- Fresh writing [sigh] yes
29
Rowen phoned last night. His light nice voice. He was at home sick and
Freya at work and they're living in Langley so he had a phone line that
wasn't crackling. In his gentle way he had a complaint. "You saw me
once a week?" I'd been too uninvolved to be able to intervene when
Mike and Lise were slopping off about school. "I let him have you"
I said. There was a silence. I've had drive and have followed through and
he hasn't. Is it my fault. I don't think so. I think it's the kind of body
he is. He'll just have to find his way. I always like him when I'm with
him but I'm still uninvolved as if he's not really my child. I can't fix
him so he can be more effective and though I'd like it if he were around
more I feel I haven't earned that. And yet when I was awake lying in the
dark this morning I noticed that I was stressed by having spoken to him.
I'm afraid of stress now.
- Is it my fault yes
- Could I have made him more effective
no
- If he'd lived with me he'd have had better work habits
yes
- But been more screwed up in other ways
yes
- So is there something I should do now
yes get to the bottom of, your withdrawal, toward judgment, and honesty
[breath]
- As above yes
DR1-1. What do I notice. 1. It's my usual unsupported jump. 2. I want
to be a poet and am not a good one. 3. I'm unbearably stressed by being
with Luke. 4. I'm lovingly charmed by many things.
- Jumping is compulsive yes
- Poetry is the true unrequited ambition
yes
- The stress with Luke is pathological
yes
- The lovingly charmed is my real strength
yes
- But I could see it wasn't enough
yes
- And was looking for power rather than recovery
yes
- Is that what you wanted me to notice
yes
- Recovery would have let me stay with Luke
yes
- Recovery would have been integration of that suicidal
child yes
- And what is behind her yes
- Isn't lovingly charmed what's behind her
no
- What's behind is secure attachment
yes
- Do I know what that feels like no
- She does yes
- Is it still there yes
-
such a frank and flourishing stile
than to participate his doings to other
nor Aphrodite of the golden rain
Then come voices in the air.
The measure is trochaic. indicated a change
of sensibility
Dies irae, dies illa
stands between two English words or includes
them
hair, foliage, standing corn, grass, indifferently
one of the most musical arrangements of words
in sequence to be found
a form like a thin sheet of flame folding and
infolding upon itself
more especially in onomatopoeia
by the use of a verb with an exact meaning
I am Arnaut who loves the wind
30
Perceiving at greater intensity and more intimately ... a sort of precision
... authenticity
The accurate artist seems to leave, not only
his greater self, but some living print of the things about which he felt
it never worth his while to bother other people by speaking, the things
he forgot for some major interest; things that his audience would have taken
for granted; things about which he had a reticence. We find these not so
much in the words but in the subtle joints of the craft
In the chapter on troubadour psychology what does he mean by visionary.
He argues for a Greek/pagan remnant in both style and subject, "whether
a sheer love of beauty and a delight in the perception of it has not become
a function of the intellect," "a glow arising from the exact nature
of the perception." I maybe am not understanding him because what he's
describing is obvious to me - I don't have the active contrast he had? He
calls it mysticism, which seems to me to imply something weirder. Did he
mean the sorts of things Peter Redgrove did? Experiences for instance of
color sensitivity after sex? The way I saw/felt my desired one mythologically?
"Let us consider the body ... our kinship to the vital universe ...
the universe of fluid force ... of wood alive, of stone alive" - he's
explicitly looking for an embodied view. But what about his contrast between
phantastikon minds and germinal minds "close on the vital universe
ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods
and godly attendants and oreads." And how then does he go on to sex
as a tension that produces light, by which he may mean "mediumistic
properties," "forms interpretive of the divine order," "interpretation
of the cosmos by feeling."
-
NY painting of the '40s and '50s, huge resistance to abstraction and
then acceptance by the '60s - this writer talking about expressing, responding
to, conditions of their time, the war etc. I love certain of that sort of
paintings more than any in existence but have no interest in their relation
to their time - I just love what they give me to see and that they've given
me that sort of seeing. They think of it as abstract and I feel it as in
effect an expansion of realism. It's the same in what I'd want from writing.
Here I thought of the panel I was on, where Colin, who was supposed to
be the moderator, hogged the event and sidelined all the rest of us. From
there to Colin at my defense, where he began hogging and I was ready and
said "Colin it's my defense not yours." And then to the meal afterwards,
where Ray sidelined me by setting his student next to him so I was shut
away from Churchland and was ignored and got no honor in the event meant
to honor me. I am remembering it still, again, profoundly shocked at heart.
I was too exhausted and hurt and trained in obedience to fight and in that
and other ways my heroic beautiful work was blocked and remains blocked
and has come to nothing.
- Because I failed the second test
no they did
One of those dreams last night where I'm pushing
through streets I don't know. There was a fence in my way - I was wanting
to take a shortcut through a campus - and I saw a section where the wire
had no barbs and made to crawl through. A man on the other side was having
to help me by pulling on me. My head was almost too big. I came out of sleep
somehow hurt about Tom - I don't remember well but there was a beautiful
ex-girlfriend who was back, it seemed.
The patriarchal stab after my defense and what happened at the last Christmas
with Tom, when I blurted out in distressed protest at his and other men's
constant pressure to push me down and he went into a rage and stormed away
leaving me sitting in my bed stunned with pain. And now after all we went
through together he won't talk to me.
31st
Snow on the highway. I had already slowed and was
going to turn left onto our road. The steering wheel locked. That sensation
of a completely stiff wheel. Had to pull up on the verge just past the turn.
[Confluence of the Nicola and the Coldwater]
volume 5
time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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