am I overreacting???!!!??!?!?

a little while ago I came to wonder if my work at the Sable Cure was, in fact, done. It's seen me through a couple of works that have been important for me and that are now complete or very near complete. I should probably vanish that draft work. the title was the genesis of one of those things.

does it have a life beyond that?  that last couple of weeks I've been journalling in a different way, just keeping lists of what I'm achieving each day. I've not been idle. I've also moved back to keeping a large-format art-paper journal. I didn't know how I missed it. I had begun to compromise with smaller and smaller notebooks people had given me - from moleskines down to A5 size - and these never had any weight or significance or imaginative spread for me. now I have room again.

I may need to feel the feeling of closing, then opening.

still on constant painkillers for these ribs, two weeks later. would like that to stop!

Queen of the Universe Parish

The Turnip Princess

went for a bike ride this late-afternoon and once I got round the corner I fell off it. I don't know how - just - suddenly out of control, had to propel myself over the front of the bike, landed on elbows, knees, solar plexus. glasses, phone, wallet, bike, bike lights all over the road, heaving for breath with the air ducts closed. crawled up the gutter off the road till breath returned, hauled stuff off the road, conscious the whole time about - was anything going to be run over? and was anybody watching? no one saw, though a couple who had seen me set off then came around the corner. she wavered, seeing me sitting on footpath with stuff, knew I had come off, I could see the pause even without glasses. I smiled, yes-I'm-perfectly-fine, picked up phone to call N.

now dazed, grazed and sore but had homemade minestrone for dinner and an icecream.

this afternoon I read through some letters S had lodged with me, I'm not sure why she did that and I didn't read them in her life. I remember once we went for a long beach walk and ended up walking around some treacherous high rocks - I think we were trapped by the tide. she was bold and I was a little wussy, without appropriate shoes. I ended up covered in mud from clinging to the ground as we went over and down. she was walking in front of me and at one point overbalanced towards the plummet down to the sea - caught herself, barely. there was nothing I could have done and she would have died. 'That would have been a comedy end, after everything' I said. that seemed flat, iron-tasting, unpleasant.

Changeable lizard

"Mouhot has collected in Siam one of those fine variations of colours, which, however, appear to be infinite."

Flying dragon

" Usually, males will mark two or three trees as their own, and one to three female Flying Dragons will live in each tree. When the male Flying Dragon meets another animal, he may extend his dewlap partially or fully, extend his wings partially or fully, perform a combination of dewlap or wing extension, or bob his body up and down. If he meets a female, he may circle her."

Skink

"As a general rule, the longer the digits, the more arboreal the species is likely to be. A biological ratio can determine the ecological niche of a given skink species. The Scincidae ecological niche index is a ratio based on anterior foot length at the junction of the ulna/radius-carpal bones to the longest digit divided by the snout-to-vent length.<sup>[1]

Water monitor</sup>

"In Thailand, the local word for a water monitor "hia" (Thai: เหี้ย) is used as an insulting word for bad and evil things including bad persons. The word is also thought to bring bad luck, so some people prefer to call the animals 'ตัวเงินตัวทอง' - which means 'silver and gold' in Thai - to avoid the jinx."

Red-tailed racer

"It feeds almost exclusively on birds, bird eggs and bats. It catches them in mid-air while hanging amongst branches."

hysteroscopy

oh dear. a necessary procedure. hoping he uses a good moustache wax. 

Dreamed that I was in a park - a little like Albert Park - tending a shrine for CCB. I had put there a photo collage with poems that he had made and entrusted to me. He'd wanted me to get it published but I didn't know how to, so I put it there supposedly as a tribute but actually because I didn't know what else to do with it. I was kind of emoting over the shrine but it was so many years since he'd died, and actually he was perfectly alive, he was there looking at it with me, which I didn't seem to register or take into account.

Suddenly a child was being attacked - she was about six or seven years old and was being stabbed and cut by a man with a knife. I helped her to get away - opened the door on the crematorium/funeral home and told her to RUN - and told N to run - then tried to run myself, with KS coming to pull me along - but I was so heavy and inert, couldn't make any progress. Even by lifting off the ground and trying to fly.

I woke up but when I went back to sleep the dream continued, in that I was on a bus with KS and FS. It seemed that they'd found out that Perry Farrell was their real dad. They got a massive pay-out and were going to be rich and happy forever. I expected to be jealous but was just so relieved and happy for them that I cried. 

.

'poobum poobum poobum poobum...'

'no, stop saying that.'


'poobum poobum poobum poobum...'

'no, stop saying that, it's naughty.'

'poobum poobum poobum poobum...'

'right, if you don't stop it, I'm going to damage something.'

'what will it be?'

'you won't know what it's going to be...'

.

[greenland is still rising out of the water since the melting of the icecaps and loss of pressure at the end of the last ice age] 'it makes me want to live a really long time to see what will happen next...'

.

mr rasbery

.

i want you to know we're being transparent in here. 

"The tree exemplifies nature as it relates with humans, feeling around the edges of our concepts, sensing openings in our awareness and forming alliances.

It enjoys contributing to our life, though there's no individual consciousness, per se.

The "tree" just chooses to focus western juniper, volcanic basalt."

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, from "Pure Immanence". Hello, the Roses. New York: New Directions, 2013.

"He could have spoken in his own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking, and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How interesting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it's your father... That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he's left lying there with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all those libidinal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, polite, and resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision: "Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular zoology.""

D & G A Thousand Plateaus, London & New York: Continuum, 2004.  42-43. 

"At that time I still knew hardly anything of the creative gift for music with which the canine race alone is endowed, it had naturally enough escaped my but slowly developing powers of observation; for though music had surrounded me as a perfectly natural and indispensable element of existence ever since I was a suckling, an element which nothing impelled me to distinguish from the rest of existence, my elders had drawn my attention to it only by such hints as were suitable for a childish understanding; all the more astonishing, then, indeed devastating, were these seven great musical artists to me. They did not speak, they did not sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another, the symmetrical patterns which they produced by one dog setting his front paws on the back of another and the rest following suit until the first bore the weight of the other six, or by all lying flat on the ground and going through complicated concerted evolutions; and none made a false move, not even the last dog, though he was a little unsure, did not always establish contact at once with the others, sometimes hesitated, as it were, on the stroke of the beat, but yet was unsure only by comparison with the superb sureness of the others, and even if he had been much more unsure, indeed quite unsure, would not have been able to do any harm, the others, great masters all of them, keeping the rhythm so unshakably."

Investigations of a Dog

Jessie's curly hair. a shower in a diner, their baby. I have designer sandals and matching socks I pull over the sandals, this is very cool, very me. And plastic bags that fit over the socks. her husband is beside me, unresponsive, hating this, eyes closed. doesn't want to talk to us. I realise (she lets me know) the bags are just packaging, not fashion. The sandals are supposed to go over the socks. Still I can wear it that way too, it's very hip, no one else will wear it. 

"My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders..."
Free Union, Andre Breton

I began a new story over the last couple of days, and yesterday felt such relief to have it find a little momentum, travel a little way on its own.

Immediately I am stuck again, wheels spinning. The problem is a composite character, who I thought I would make a little bit this person and a little bit that. But I am writing about a family, and it seems to me that no family can be composite; each member is precisely balanced in response to the others, and it seems that the biographical details of a person are also balanced like cards in a card house, and that no choice is random. So I want someone who played rockabilly in real life to now play blues, but my imagination won't have it. It's not TRUE. This man from the mines played rockabilly, that man from the refinery played the blues. This man from the mines had duck-tail hair and his friends wore suits. That man from the refinery had long hair and his friends wore beards. The man from the mines told his sad story in loops, a confused truth of heroism and pity. The man from the refinery could only tell other stories, because his own was lost. The facts of each story seem so absolutely interdependent and necessary to me. And the truth has a stranglehold, because I can't write the truth. 

I keep thinking about that willow tree that Rousseau planted with his cousin - the diversion of water, the vigour and violence of the tree and the channel getting chopped up by the uncle, that the whole endeavour was so exciting that they held no grudge about the destruction. reading at the same time as the Deleuze about rhizomes, thinking the channel as a rhizome that breaks out of the structures of a tree. reading at the same time as Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge Hello, the Roses, - when I see a plant I expand my boundaries, it 'collapses its boundaries'. this is the one phrase that seems to me to be untrue, or I don't know yet how it is true. I think she is right that a plant Does Something in communication, that the attribution of intention is not actually a fallacy - because intention is an emergent property, and human experience of intention as independent, self-willed, self-propelling is the real fallacy. but 'collapses its boundaries' in being seen... I don't believe or don't get. 

so hard to remember my dreams at the moment. one last night was about carpet. there I was looking at the wooden floor, with one patch of vintage carpet - a mottled brown and cream pattern, with large floral indentations. I began to see how this carpet, although it was a relic of an earlier decor, would actually look wonderful throughout these rooms. it would suit the rest of the decor and the room so much better than the shining wood. 

Wake up, do a rain dance with a bloody nose. Smoke is the second thought of the day. But sitting at my desk, looking out the window, trees still rustle and shine in the wind. It's funny how their acquiescence to movement - to the movement of another force - makes them seem very alive. And if they were dead the movement would be more brittle. But the wind is not alive, unless

I went around the windows looking for air leaks, and discovered that most of them actually had condensation holes. I stuffed paper napkins in the holes, ousting a small gecko from one of them. still the smog gets in here and there and we have faintly sore eyes, lips, nostrils.

workers on the cherry pickers and construction sites without respirators. crowded streets. air the colour of milky tea. across the water somewhere peat-land smoulders on and on. 

N suggests cures for writer's block:

-Watch a lot of anime
-Fix a bike
-Watch Macgyver
-Actually consume laxatives
-Listen to some music

two dreams about friends.

One is about Meredith, at College Place. I go to visit with someone else who is showing me her life. she has things up on the walls about her next trips - she takes annual trips with friends and plans them down to the last detail. I see that she has nothing else in her life. she's very pale and dry, almost corpse-like, with painfully dry lips.

the other involves a boat trip or bus trip, by the coast in south america, we see a house that has iced over - more like a silo sitting in the water. Katrina's there and cuddling me, it's sweet and lovely. 

Dreamed about a boarding house. There's an older woman leaving - some kind of drama around this. She's beautifully groomed. I think I have to try to sort out the drama and convince her to stay, even though I don't really know what's going on, it's not my job, she doesn't really relate to me. There's a large and (to me) very special, valuable pack of cards of a particular type, sealed. I'm excited about them but she's not.

dream-words: adoption - witness/witless - Red Lakes - Victoria

---

We're staying at LA's for her birthday weekend. I've forgotten to get her a present. I want to have a shower so I hop in - she's already put it on - I'm wearing underpants, I start to pee in the shower - she comes to hop in - she put it on for her and not me - I get out to let her have it and I dribble pee on the floor - swipe it with my foot - I'm in the toilet room sitting on the toilet by the window, I try to pull the clear patterned shower curtain across the window it's very short. There's a public swimming pool outside, kids gather to start watching me - I try to make it more private. I go into the bedroom where everyone is taking a nap. I pat a guy's head because I think it must be Nic but I realise she has three other guests and none of them are Nic. she's asleep in the next room. I didn't realise she was going to have guests other than me, that it's a big weekend and they've brought presents. I start to massage her feet, that at least is nice for her. 

I dream we're living with my parents, it's a split-level house. To get to work in the mornings I have to go through my parents' bedroom. I wake up, I'm grumpy, I'm going through, maybe that's where I get dressed in the mornings. Nic's already up and about. He's left my vibrators on mum's bed or near there. I'm irritated with him, it's a privacy violation and a dumb idea but then I start thinking maybe I'm grumpy because I haven't come for ages. I realise there's a Hitachi Magic Wand there which I've never bothered using because I'm irritated with him about sex toys. So I decide to use it. I lie down and start figuring it out - it has a panel with a music selection on the back, headphones, all kinds of attachments and gadgetry.

As I'm figuring it out my mum walks in. I'm surrounded by toys and lube, it's obvious what I'm doing. I put my hands out to cover all that and say something really grumpy. Nic has walked in after her and is delighted that I was going to use it and finds all this really funny. My mum has walked off, either mutually embarrassed and annoyed at me for the violation or pissed off that I'm being so grumpy. I'm annoyed and humiliated. I walk up to the next (split) level to continue getting ready for work and my brother is in one of the bedrooms, he's young (a teenager) and slim and Asian. He tells me about once when the same thing happened to him and I'm so grateful, it makes me feel heaps better. 

Dreamed of an African-American man, thick-set and with a short beard, walking in jeans and a black turtle-neck beside the pine plantations on the way into Taupo, near the flowering gorse.
-

Dreamed that I was consulting with a student, she wants to write an essay on a particular aspect of South African history. She's written an abstract, it's quite a well defined thesis. She's asking me what grade she would get for that sort of essay. I say it depends how well she develops the argument and how thorough and precise she is with her historical detail but the essay has a lot of potential. She says could it even be an A-? I say yes, trying to figure out how to tell her it could be an A if she works hard on it, but without encouraging her to have expectations for the grading.

I go on to lunch with my colleagues, which is in a large marquee. I'm talking to one of my colleagues about this, telling the story with irritation, rolling my eyes that she'd wanted to know the grade before writing the essay but maybe not saying that clearly. My colleague indicates something to me - I turn around and the student is beside me. I am embarrassed. I try to pick up the conversation with her about the essay again, tell her I think it will be good, and she's polite but I know she'd overheard and is upset and annoyed. Eventually I say something like - you talk about these things to let off pressure at work but it doesn't necessarily indicate what you really think. What I really think is that the essay has a lot of potential. She nods and seems to accept that.

Then I'm trying to get food. One colleague wants something to cool his mouth; he's vegetarian and maybe he's eaten some chili. I indicate a couple of salads, including a tomato salad. In looking for vegetarian food I end up with half a roll of compressed spinach on my plate. I have to move this away from my boss's backside, which is inadvertently very close to it. Then I'm looking for other food for myself and others.

Somewhere in there are two versions of the "seed of life" pattern, one only in outline and one more filled in, but a little further out of sight. 

a dream I ignored (I think) from a while ago - I didn't know how to describe it but it feels important to write it down because I ignored it, quite willfully.

It's a kind of elevated twisting slide, like a waterslide or a luge, on quite high scaffolding. it extends from here across the border into one of the Koreas. 

after a long walk fell asleep on the couch facing the back cushion. wake to the neighbours arguing, palms together and fingers loosely laced above my forehead. the sound is a concrete floor plane and several sharp lines/strips hovering above that at vertical angles, past arguments, virtual arguments. teenage girl slams the front door and calls the lift.

it was a long walk with a neighbour and her baby that made me sleep, we were all too hot. neighbour in pre-grief, a family illness, anger and tension rigid. woodpecker flies to a tree. 'damn it, why are you in a state, my baby?' 'the colour of melanoma is black'. kingfisher flies to a tree, blue wings shining far off. I can't make work in this, there's no hope. yes, I feel that I don't want to spread my misery around. but a project, an event, a container, a funnel, a channel....

"In a moment the plants, the channel, the hollow, the willow, everything was destroyed, everything was ploughed up; without there being, during this terrible dispatch, any other word uttered except that exclamation, endlessly repeated: an aqueduct! he cried as he shattered everything, an aqueduct! an aqueduct!"

J-J Rousseau, Confessions.  Oxford: OUP, 2008. p23

"Besides translating inner images into a painting, for example, we unconsciously translate inaudible sounds into images, or a spring peeper translates its multidimensions aurally.

What sounds like a million frogs is a young mother and her twin girls, flute and voices casting across rustling foliage a dimension not in time but intensity, like light in all the dark places of inner listening."

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, from "DJ Frogs". Hello, the Roses. New York: New Directions, 2013. 

"my horse"

A dream about LK. the lower half of her face, broad, American housewife face, pretty in a middle-aged way - on a screen - a billboard screen - someone's making a movie or advertisement, mocking her, at the same time it's being projected/played, it's a campaign. It says that she's a narcissist, a fool, something like that. I'm horrified, people have come to this conclusion, it's exposed now, there will be no saving her. the whole town has turned against her. then I find out a little more - I realise there's a reason for it, that she was on a committee and had - self-serving, almost on a whim - decided to block funding for the town football team. the publicity is both a defamation campaign and a neutral/sympathetic documentary about that. she's a 'stonewaller', is the idea from the campaign. 

"let me have my victimhood just this once!"

Plant Society

Last night I dreamed that we were in bed asleep, and I felt a cat walk over me and settle by our heads, a creamy-orange tom cat. it had snuck in from outside, a cat we didn't know. I was mostly asleep, happy and excited to have a cat visitor, also thinking I should wake up and do something about it because it was an unknown cat, might have fleas or ringworm or something. but it was snuggling into N's head and N was smiling, so I just cuddled in too. 

I had to throw out one of my favourite potplants. It got red spider mite. It'd had a rough time since I brought it home - I'd tried it in different spots, then repotted it, it seemed to be getting better and there was even a new shoot coming though - then it just started to look sad again, and the leaves were yellowing very quickly. I looked closer and discovered the whole plant was covered in a series of very fine webs. There were even one or two of my hairs caught in the webs. And tiny spiders were crawling all over.The undersides of those big, broad leaves were absolutely covered in spider-mite eggs along the midribs and veins. I thought about treating it but it seems that they get into the soil, and I have been trying not to use any pesticides - so, out it went. Now I miss it! What will the mites do, once they've killed it? Will they find something else to live on in amongst the rubbish, in the dark down the bottom of the chute?

I remembered - I am remembering pieces from Of Grammatology. 

waking in the night, husband studying...I'm hungry, my shoulder hurts, the world is empty and hard... he slides open the door to the laundry to put the washing on for the morning, the house fills with warm air and the sound of crickets, and then the kettle sings....



I think when we get home I want to go visit the pohangina river. 

I rode to work to tidy up a few things and rode home, arriving with the first fat drops of rain . My next door neighbour who has a cold was sitting in the circle between our buildings, under the climbing gym, with her baby on a blanket. tiny stones coming off the asphalt, baby moving legs like a little frog.

---

feeding myself again, slowly but quickly as possible. well is 2/3rds full. wondering what to read next - a whole list of stuff but none of it seems quite 'right'. for some reason I want to read Rousseau's Confessions. I open it and find I remember the beginning, but I don't know how much of it I might have read,... definitely not all of it, and not sure why I want to now. It's not on my list of should-read-right-now stuff - actually I had better be reading poetry. 

"I look into his eyes and feel my
awareness expand to contain what he
will tell me, as if what he says is a
photograph of landscape and in my
mind will be a painting of "Hill,"
"Part of the Cliffs," "Purple Hills."

These words are the opposite of
verisimilitude."

...

"If existence is vibration, everything
creates sound - trees, heart cells.

Listeners, like water, resonate dread
in a blue vase, in glasses.

I send out an emotion of warmth,
welcome, the way scientists erase
sound with sound."

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. From "Red Quiet". Concordance (with Kiki Smith). N.p.: Kelsey St Press,  2006. 

One dream about being in a group of women in a halfway house.

Another where I was in a huge home, with this huge family - most were adults, dark-haired, but there were some kids too. I knew there was something wrong. Soon I was talking to someone down the end of one room and I saw in the corner, behind a wardrobe, the patriarch sexually abusing one of the little kids. The others were just looking away, trying not to know. I stepped back so it was out of my line of sight too, but I realised I had to do something. I yelled 'NO', hoping this would be enough to tell him it couldn't continue, without creating a dangerous situation. It worked - the old guy stepped out from corner, away from the kid, fearing he was busted.

I knew then this was endemic in this family, that everyone knew about it on some level or other but it was never spoken about, that he had done it to lots of the adults when they were kids, that others may be doing it too, there was an unspoken law not to talk about this.

I started going around the house protesting to people, saying I had seen it, it couldn't continue, something had to be done. I knew there wasn't enough evidence and that what I'd seen would be questioned. I found I couldn't exactly remember what he was wearing and in my memory it was starting to look like someone else. But I felt sure of what I had seen, too. Most people blanked me or told me to go away but I found one woman in her forties, sad and listless, and from her reaction I knew it had happened to her and she knew exactly what I was talking about. I grabbed her in a headlock and brought her with me to look for other people who could help. We ended up down in the basement/computer room where there were a couple of rangy nephews lying on couches, outsiders in the family. I started talking to them and I knew they knew what I was talking about too. I figured that if I could get them to talk I might have a chance.

when I think of my poppa and the things he gave me I feel uneasy, I can't feel his love like this. the ring that I lost is there, not the right sort of presence. I imagine him knowing where it is and that's ambiguous. but one night I imagined very vividly that he was speaking to me. we had a long conversation, and it was not ambiguous any more, it was joyous and peaceful, total love, like when we said goodbye.

I don't remember the details of that conversation, and day-to-day his gifts to me bring mixed feelings - not about him, but just that I can't find him there. but today I remembered how much he LOVED the hoodie that we gave him. He wore it all the time. I have a photo of him in it. He just totally adored it. that is much easier. 

the horizontal journey is... across the dried floodplain towards a new familiar home
(the honey cells are a layover)

the vertical journey is... down into the sea-garden, pythia

the temporal journey is... earlier during later, burial excavation eruption burial, vertical and horizontal, staying here and going there, a wave.

when I say under the sea I mean in my stomach, where we can't see... in the garden....

unable to sleep, unable to write. I miss my friend in the UK, wish she was here with me playing cards in the back of the soul bar.

there are things I want to describe - Johnny the drummer, with his long, fine Asian hair, watching his teenage kid ripping it up on the drums. some nights the kid races through, especially if they have a weak singer, and some nights he's brilliant, falling slowly into another world with the bassist, where they see the same horizons and the same suns, and they draw them out with sound, pulling the band into weird orbit, the audience too, till everyone's inside that orange space, blue land cresting behind. Johnny sits and listens, same expression every time.

honestly, I want to describe how he gave me his number and I felt welcomed, and then when I went back there with friends he wasn't so friendly again, and I thought I'd maybe offended him by saying something typically ang moh. or it was that he meant the number to mean something else and I was dumb, or it was just... chance, a nothingness.

I wouldn't put this down because - what does it mean, this nothingness? it's an ego bubble, floating through, blocking the arterial flow. or else it's something so finely woven - threads of offering, the offering lain down on the ground and the other party touches it but does not pick it up, steps around it - something has gone wrong, the welcome is not right.

nothing is right here. guest of the master who eats the servant's food. 

I'm still trying to wash stuff up from the semester, with some urgency. Head still full of stuff that needs to be done Now for others, and I'm stalling, spinning my wheels as I try to both get that done and also make the shift back to my writing mind. Forward and back at the same time.

I'm sitting on the couch with the lights out. I've opened a window - can hear crickets and cars, people in the circle below. If I lean my head out I can hear a kind of soft blanket of conversations from people and TVs in the apartments opposite. It's so quiet. For months there has been construction going on at work, and lately they are painting our apartment blocks at home. The cherry-pickers have enormous engines that run a constant loud irregular noise. Before the painting there were weeks of waterblasting, of all the paths and all the covered walkways - the hoses run from tank-trucks which make the same kind of engine noise. And before the water-blasting was renovation on the apartments below and above us - tearing up the tiles and retiling, etc. So it's been pretty inescapable noise pollution since some time last year.

It's very hard to get away here. One can't easily go to an outdoor space (usually too hot) or a public indoor space (almost always crowded) to get peace. So for the night to just sort of fall open like this is beautiful.

But the night is often like this - quiet, open - we just keep the windows closed for the airconditioning, so we never feel it.

It's like this, living on the equator in the 21st century. You're just trying to keep it all out, secure your structure. It's not novel to notice this, on paper, but when you're living it it becomes invisible. It's just what you do to try to make things work. But sooner or later you have to wonder what would happen if it all stopped - the painting, the waterblasting, the construction, the airconditioning, the insecticide fogging, the leaf-blowing.

A green half-sleep would fall over us. Fevers would creep into the dozing. Moss would slip over every surface. Vines would begin work at the cracks and corners of walls. The drains would clog with thick, fat leaves, and the monsoon would have its merry way all over the roads and rooves, opening structures piece by piece.

As soon as I opened the window a striped mosquito flies in to try to bite me. They move so fast, designed to evade a slapping hand or tail. I wonder what it carries that I can't see. And does a mosquito feel different in itself when it's got dengue or malaria? Are they more hungry or more frantic?

Life goes on, doesn't it? Maybe changing uncontrollably quickly, in waste and mismanagement, devolving and fragmenting, but it's so hungry, it goes on. 

I dream I'm in bed with this guy, a freelance writer in the community. We're kissing but he stops to talk because he's not so into it. He starts telling me what he does with his day, his writing routine, and he wants to hear about mine. I realise he's trying to get himself aroused. 'No really, how do you spend your actual time? What do you do?'

I realise I only have one honest answer. 'Admin.'

That's the end of that.

--

A dream where I'm remembering the different places I've lived, trying to think about the kind of place I like, in conversation with my dad. We're at this casual afternoon party in a rambling farmhouse yard. We talk about the houses by the sea, that it was sometimes so lonely and frightening to see huge uncontrollable waves coming in, to know that something was wrong with the tides and the weather and that the tiny house on the edge could be swept away. I wonder if there was any place where I've looked out the window and felt peaceful, that everything was okay. And I think no, the reason these places are available for me to rent is because the owners have moved on, because something was wrong, and the weather's fucked everywhere now anyway. My dad says what about those places owned by Tina, were they a bit rough were they?

And I say actually no, they were nice, scruffy but they had sunlight and gardens, open windows, flowers in the house. A bit like this place.

We go close to the stereo at the centre of the party to hear the music. I put my ear close to the stereo and it's tango music. My dad's right there, we're communicating without necessarily speaking about the complexity of the music, its structures and features. I know these rather than him but he understands what I'm explaining.



Then I'm in a train. There is a young guy there who has trouble speaking, he might be retarded. He's big and strapping, I want to kiss him but I think I should think twice, it will mean that we end up getting married. My mother is there watching, too, and she will disapprove. He's trying to ask me something - eventually I get it. He's asking if I can make him a sweat-shirt jacket that would zip on to the collar he's made for himself. He already has one jacket that he's made but he wants a different one. He shows me the collar and it's really inventive and neatly made - it has compartments front and back, a hood, everything zips on and off. It's great and I realise he's really bright in an unusual way. I want to make the jacket and I want to hug him and kiss him. He's showing me he his photos on his camera and I realise he's a time-traveller - the photos are late 19th, early 20th C and he's in them. While he's showing me I realise my mother is right there taking photos of his camera as it flashes up photos and dates. She's collecting evidence in a hostile sort of way. 

grading finished, except for the wash-up. end of the school year. late nights over. I offered my boss a fist fight and he patted me on the arm. this evening I napped. more sleep now, then time to get the house back in order. 

I dreamed I was back at home, and a friend was telling me about her wheat-free diet. I said I didn't do that and she laughed and said 'we know', indicating the 20 pounds of weight I'd put on (dreaming in imperial). She said something else snarky and then I spent a long time in an elaborate and deeply reflective explanation of why I needed an apology from her, and what kind of apology I needed. She laughed and brushed it off. We were at the back of a house, going up to a sundeck (and swimming pool?) on top of a garage - in the garage was some kind of boat or car, ready to go somewhere. 

arguing with my boss. chucking a sad about doing just one more thing. he's doing too many things too. 

In my dream, S's dog was a golden retriever. She said no, she hadn't left him to me, I didn't need to look after him.

Typing on the way here - 'sablecurr'

I dreamed that I was back at home, catching up with S's friends about her death. Someone said - yes, you've always seemed sweet and kind - we think she wrote about you in this poem. There's this character Sue that we thought was probably you - she is reaching her hand out to pat a dog but the more she wants to pat it the more the dog backs away!

I want to explain that it's the opposite, that I patted a dog and it wanted more and more until it had to be sent away because it was going crazy with anxiety. But I know that sounds stupid and arrogant so I don't say anything.

It turns out though that S has been misdiagnosed, and she's not dead at all. We are in her house and I get to see her again. I'm so relieved and she seems quite well, but we know she is going to die soon. I think this is my opportunity to ask the things or talk about the things we didn't get the chance to talk about. I ask her about the dog, and she says yes, the dog was much more difficult to look after than she let on to anybody, so she'd hidden it or sent it away. Then all I can think of to ask is whether she has any reassurance for other friends. And I realise I'm not being very helpful, so I start to do the dishes.

TV crews have shown up outside and left piles of present boxes and balloons on the front lawn - it's her birthday, but really they want to interview her about her miraculous situation. My stepdad comes in to ask whether she wants to do this and he's impatient and demanding. Yes or no, chop-chop! Instantly I'm anxious and I bark back at him. I realise this is not helpful, so I calm myself down and take over the conversation. Would she like me to go and get rid of them? Yes.

So I go out and it's TV1 and TV3. TV3 is there. I tell them she doesn't want to spend her last minutes like this and they start to scatter. Mark Sainsbury looks at me and says - we agree, most of us didn't want to be here doing this, it's a terrible idea. The producers pushed us.

They leave. I go in and we have just quiet empty time together, with nothing to do.

When I've pushed one of my students really hard and they stay with it, and I read their final draft, and it's GOOD - I get so excited for them - I want the world to recognise them RIGHT NOW. And happy for me, too, that it's been worth it, and that I had something to do with it, telling them not to compromise, holding out for something better.

I dreamed last night that a friend came to stay at our place. It was messy, we hadn't cleaned up, and I was anxious about knickers on the floor and so on, trying to kick them out of the way. I was worried that his wife would be uncomfortable. I showed him the view out the window - the beautiful trees in the light-well, and while we were looking I saw a monkey - 'it's the first time I've seen one here!'

Then I realised there was no glass, and there were several gliding monkeys and small flying squirrels leaping around the place. They were coming inside freely, approaching us. A little squirrel landed on my hand and began to purr loudly as I patted its sleek body - they had no fear at all. Untrammelled delight. 

G's receptionist rang me today.

'Just calling about your appointment with G.'

'...I don't have an appointment with G.'

'You wrote an email this morning to ask for one?'

'It must have been somebody else with my name.'

Memory of the dream where he says 'don't bullshit, you've been calling me on this number for years.'
But I hadn't. The receptionist apologised and hung up. I sent a text to let G know this had happened. I justified it like - well, if it were him, with his crackpot thinking, he'd think it was a sign. And besides which it's a disturbance on the one side and a confidentiality breach on the other, so he should know, so they can make sure it doesn't happen again.

But it wasn't a sign, it was just... a painful thing. Someone with my name is writing for an appointment, and no doubt getting one. Not that he ever said I COULDN'T come back - it just... became clear. For stupid reasons that make no sense. So when the receptionist called it was like the ground opened up again. There I am falling back into my stupid transference hell. I don't understand, why are you doing this to me? I don't understand. 

'Oh. Ok,' he wrote back. 'Yeah I was curious. K thanks for the update.'

'I guess R should respond via the means people contact, or at least verify, because it could cause problems.' I don't understand, why are you doing this to me? I don't understand. 

' Yeah I'm not in the office so I don't know what happened. Apologies for the confusion.'

I hate you. I hate you and would like to bodily destroy you, probably with a chainsaw.

L wrote to me last night to say that C had overdosed while on the phone to her and was now in hospital. I feel a curious inertia about this. I could see it coming a while back so I'd let the distance grow, becoming a 'bad friend' in some respects.

L was on the adrenaline rollercoaster, high on the magnitude of saving someone's life, the deferred fear and panic, anger as it hit her what C is doing to herself and her loved ones, and the love and pain for C herself, for what she's enduring that is taking her here.

I could see L so badly wanting to do the right thing, and then wanting the happy ending for having done the right thing. But C was so drugged up that she couldn't even remember the phone call, and had no idea how come the fire department had turned up. She's in for a long stay.

Although I feel a certain kind of 'nothing' about this I've been thinking about it on and off all day. I feel this vague sickness and a glimmer of opening for my friend, a desire to reach out to her, and then it gets squashed. Is there a way to tell her that I care about her, that I want her to be well?

But I don't want to talk to the C who would do this to herself. I don't want to see it or know about it. I've met that C before and she is vicious. Lately she has been holding the keys to the body and is in the process of starving the body, abusing it, killing it off if she can. I can't speak to her and pretend that is not who I am talking to.

And what do I have to say to that person? It is not a conversation I am qualified for. Yet as I write this I think - well, that is her argument, it's the one she's trapped in, the one she's having with her doctors and shrinks and so on. Maybe I can leave it to them, and still just give her - the whole C - that one small message, that I care about her and wish her well. 

last night I dreamed I was at a beach in a remote town at home. I've dreamed about this place before. It's something like my mother's hometown but more remote, on a peninsula that seems almost entirely made of sand, and the beachscape is steep and grand, like somewhere only ships would land. There's a thin row of houses up on the peninsula. 

last night I was in the water, trying to wade my way up onto the beach, and each time I made some progress a wave would come and drag me back. I was making a herculean effort to break through that invisible barrier to get to the point where it would finally be easier. 

an inward deviation of the eyes

meast

a second appointment yesterday with a new woman whose initials are also SB. a new guardian on the door. once a month. she has strange wet eyes, like she regularly looks through a glass to another realm. and a nice smile.

afterwards I went into the shops again, and I bought checked pants, and silky tops in vivid green and soft pink and one in soft green with small purple birds tending its regency flowers. I bought sandals that divide my feet into six equal cubes and sandals with cushioned soles for long walks.

this morning i lay dozing and i became a young south asian man walking through a tunnel, agitated, banging the wall, wanting to get out. but the tunnel shifted in angle and the exit became visible. the tunnel opens out onto a green world, trees shifting calmly in the breeze.

I have changed the background at a bee curls and finally it feels open again. the dog, I realise, was the guardian. 

tupelo

I dreamed that my sister/friend and I decided we wanted a man to share our ship with. So with our staff we went looking for one and chose one of the popes that was on tv. We had only caught the end of his show but he seemed pretty good. It seemed like it would be good to have someone with that authority and presence, to guide us. Someone to follow.

We prepared the stateroom for him, making the bed beautifully. But when his staff brought him in we realised he was not what we'd expected. He could not speak or communicate at all, just rock and thrash and make a constant high-pitched whine. We took him into the stateroom and he dragged all the bedclothes onto the floor, to make a messy nest, which was the only place he would be able to sleep. And this was all he was capable of, so this is what we'd got for ourselves.

"A king and his slave

There was a monarch who once loved a slave.
 The youth's pale beauty haunted him; he gave
The favourite the rarest ornaments,
Watched over him with jealous reverence -
But when the king expressed a wish to shoot,
His loved one shook from head to foot.
An apple balanced on his head would be
The target for the royal archery,
And as the mark was split he blenched with fear.
One day a foolish courtier standing near
Asked why his lovely face was drained and wan,
For was he not the monarch's chosen one?
The slave replied: "If I were hit instead
Of that round apple balanced on my head,
I would be then quite worthless to the king -
Injured or dead, lower than anything
The court can show; but when the arrow hits
The trembling target and the apple splits,
That is his skill. The king is highly skilled
If he succeeds - if not the slave is killed.""

from Farid Attar, The Conference of the Birds, tr. Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis.  London: Penguin Classics, 2011. 

I went to a 'mindfulness and writing' workshop today, hosted by someone else.

We sat, walked, lay, breathed, and then wrote. 

-

leaves no longer grow

but water still trickles through

branches, feeding moss

-

she could hear

the creature moving itself into place.

it had come to take walls from their homes. 

she could hear

its expectations in her mind, 

much louder than any thoughts she had

but she still had thoughts. 

she thought about where they would live

and whether the babies would sleep or cry

under the stars, amongst

the blue fields of concrete dust

falling like stars,

swirling like galaxies away  from 

soft warm mouths. 

she thought about water

and where they would find it.

she could hear the water in their sleep

much more than in their cries. 

later they would drink the sound of rubber melting

and grow that way. 

they would eat with each other

bitterly or sweetly. 

they would fold the shapes 

of houses with their hands, 

and passers-by throw money

thinking the shadows were birds

that carried the seed

of the native tree.


(I don't like this poem. It's just a series of gestures.)

I first met S when I was teaching a week-long community holiday workshop in poetry. She contacted me beforehand to see if it would be okay for her as someone who had written criticism but no poetry before. And there was another guy, a very accomplished and astute Japanese professor who wanted some time writing poetry in English.

So in the weeks leading up to the workshop I was terrified. It was going to be a small class but I felt so inadequate to teach them anything. Then a week or two beforehand my stepmum had a stroke-like episode and went into a kind of coma, we thought she would die, and not for the first time. I drove up north to help look after my dad. He was getting around in a daze. The dogs were not house-trained. My dad was opening bills for the business for the first time ever and finding that everything was on final notice. Nothing added up. At the hospital my sister sat by the bedside wondering what the fuck to do. To change my step-mum's catheter or sheets required multiple nursing staff, sometimes up to six at a time just to roll her onto her side. There was no way of scanning her or knowing what was going on or if she would ever recover. The nurses would argue with frustration over how to even move her.

I was so scared for my dad, and angry with him too. Why wasn't everything okay? How could I possibly begin to look after him? I bossed him around a bit, ineffectually, over the days of my stay, and then I had to go.

Out of the fear and wrongness of it all I found myself determined to teach a beautiful class, to make something good, a place for poetry. I told myself I would not be afraid of their learning, I would not try to dominate by teaching, I would just facilitate, and learn. We began by reciting Drunken Boat together, listening to each other's voices. I tried to get them to think of creating and editing as separate, just for a time. I asked them to bring poems they loved each day and I did the same. Rilke's Eighth Duino Elego, Denise Levertov's Pleasures. The Japanese guy brought Robert Duncan. I'm not sure who S brought, I don't remember. Some Ted Hughes, I think. But I remember S's own poems, having a weird sense of resonance with them, because the aesthetic felt so close to somewhere I had been. She was writing about her oldest child and there was a profound sense of haunting. And a desolation that I recognised, a specifically maternal, ecological desolation. I never thought to ask her where that came from because it seemed SO familiar.

Afterwards we would meet up occasionally, every two or three months, to share poems. Warm as they were there was also something a little bit stiff about those meetings, even though we liked each other very much. I felt sure of my aesthetic opinions but never felt a justified authority for them, so I was a bit defensive. I think we were both guarding our aesthetics. And we didn't break through our mutual reserve to talk about things more personal than poetry, though that was personal enough.

It shifted when she got sick. Suddenly I could see what she was, the friendship that had been building, what I could lose. The trust, her grace and equanimity. I wanted to be there for her and I didn't want to lose her. I remember seeing her at the hospital for the first time after I got back from London, and she was so open. I remember her telling me stuff and then saying yes, I just had a feeling you'd understand that. And so we became confidantes. It turned out we were walking some quite similar, quite treacherous terrain on a couple of things. So we walked in parallel on those things for the next five years, sharing stuff that was unshareable most other places. Slowly both got to safer ground, calling once every few weeks to talk through pretty much everything.

But our journeys were at different orders of magnitude. I was a good friend to her and I am glad of that. Meanwhile she was incredible, making life itself out of sheer love and positive will.
I wonder now what I will be able to take of that, what I can take in and make my own.

I dreamed last night that I was at a beach with students. I was showing them how you could hold a length of kite paper or even a towel across your back, angle yourself and lift off the ground. Dip and weave like a kite. I was flying here and there around the beach and water, no great height, it was lovely. I was telling them not to dip down into the sea water, because it was so hard to get any lift once you were wet. At the same time I was doing this, getting wet, enjoying the feeling of the salt water and trying to fly at the same time. 

I went shopping all day, to try to do something necessary but not requiring any engaged thought. Drifting shop to shop, exercising 'choice'. It's like this gives a legitimacy to non-personage. You just choose pieces of identity to fit on, build a person out of clothes. I don't want to hate it any more. There are ways to make it work better: do it regularly, research, remember what you own, remember your sizes, look at pictures, look in the mirror, notice what others wear and decide what you like. Decide what you like. And then when you have enough of what you like from enough different sources that is what you are. People see this and they care. People can see you. They make evaluations about what you are like and under certain circumstances they discuss that. Usually to the effect that you are too this or a bit that. Quite this but very that. So you want to look a bit like what you think you'd like to be thought of.

So I went around all afternoon thinking 'I like that' 'I don't like that'. And I came home with an orange cardigan with pink trim. And a shirt with a large paisley flowers-and-birds print on it, and a t-shirt that N liked. When I got home again I guess I felt more personish, because I put them on and thought Yes I do like that! And I thought I should have a green top to go with the cardigan and maybe even some checked trousers.

I think when you have a long talk with a friend you become a person. When you have a series of long talks over a long time you are together persons made in that. When you lose someone who has one end of your conversations it's hard. Right now she's all around being newly dead and concretely so, and today he gave you a reprieve because of grief. But really you need more points of reference. Colours, objects, closeness.  

Last night I dreamed I came out of an elevator in an apartment building into someone else's house. I knew it was not the right floor, that I wasn't supposed to be there. But the apartment was huge and I was sort of curious to see inside it, and I sort of thought I would find a way through there to stairs or another lift to take me to where I was supposed to be. I wandered for quite a while, half hiding from the various people I saw at a distance in other rooms, or on loungers around the pool. I came to where I thought I could get out - a door to a lift well or stairwell - and I was face to face with the owner. I think it was Sarah, but we didn't know or recognise each other. I felt guilty but it wasn't awful, it seemed I could explain. 

I should maybe have called this blog notes from silence. I come back to this place where it seems impossible to say anything. standing looking at the world with mouth agape, hands dumb. one of my other notebooks, a bee curls, is mincemeat, I'm thinking of killing it because I can't the feeling of it. it flowered then the flower shrivelled and now it stinks.

ceaseblur is trickling over here, bits of reading, that's ok. the 'blank' diary has been quiet for most of two months.

I had a dream the other night that someone came to visit and i noticed we had dead rats behind our kitchen door. Two and a half dead rats. i was trying to clean them up, pick them up with plastic bags but one of them was so decayed it was the consistency of mousse.

"(ll. 452-461) `Strangers, who are you? Whence come you sailing
along the paths of the sea? Are you for traffic, or do you
wander at random over the sea as pirates do who put their own
lives to hazard and bring mischief to men of foreign parts as
they roam? Why rest you so and are afraid, and do not go ashore
nor stow the gear of your black ship? For that is the custom of
men who live by bread, whenever they come to land in their dark
ships from the main, spent with toil; at once desire for sweet
food catches them about the heart.'"
...

"(ll. 526-530) `Lord, since you have brought us here far from our
dear ones and our fatherland, -- for so it seemed good to your
heart, -- tell us now how we shall live. That we would know of
you. This land is not to be desired either for vineyards or for
pastures so that we can live well thereon and also minister to
men.'

(ll. 531-544) Then Apollo, the son of Zeus, smiled upon them and
said: `Foolish mortals and poor drudges are you, that you seek
cares and hard toils and straits! Easily will I tell you a word
and set it in your hearts. Though each one of you with knife in
hand should slaughter sheep continually, yet would you always
have abundant store, even all that the glorious tribes of men
bring here for me. But guard you my temple and receive the
tribes of men that gather to this place, and especially show
mortal men my will, and do you keep righteousness in your heart.
But if any shall be disobedient and pay no heed to my warning, of
if there shall be any idle word or deed and outrage as is common
among mortal men, then other men shall be your masters and with a
strong hand shall make you subject for ever. All has been told
you: do you keep it in your heart.'"

Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo tr Evelyn-White

I think of the days of our cat Bella's death as hot and fuzzy, black with her fur, prickly, salty. Can I write about this? When the nurses took her into the other room to put a catheter in her leg she was already very weak, but she turned to look right back over the vet nurse's arms and straight into my eyes. Why would I write about this? It was the middle of winter. N stood beside me. They returned her, still wrapped in the green crocheted blanket, to my arms. She relaxed into the cuddle as soon as she was back there, as though we were at home. She was so weak by then. The nurses had already told us what to expect, and gave us time like that until we were ready.

What I regret is that as they moved towards us with the injection they were making noises, as though to calm her down, but it was the noises that were disturbing. They were tense, tutting and cooing. They said 'talk to her, tell her you're there', so I did, but that was not what I wanted. I wanted to be silent with her. She knew I was there, we were together. She knew N was standing beside us and we were safe. But they made noises, and it was disturbing. She didn't wriggle or startle but she was aware, wary of the sounds. Those moments should have been peaceful, they could have come quietly and she would have felt more safe.

Once they put the injection in through the catheter it was instant, her heart just stopped and she was limp. Her bladder released through the blanket and I lifted her up to the vet's table so that we wouldn't be totally covered in wee.

Then my memory is a little bit fuzzy. I had another blanket with me, really a large piece of soft velveteen fabric, and I'm not sure if we wrapped her in it there or kept her in the crocheted blanket until we got to Mum's. I remember how her body kept its warmth as I held it against me, and how naturally it moved into the various positions of her life - snuggled against me as we drove, or curled in a circle, which is how we wrapped and buried her.

I unwrapped her so that Mum could kiss her goodbye.

That morning I had sat with her on the front steps and we watched the birds on the front lawn. It was drizzly and she was so happy to be out there, watching, alert, from the blanket in my arms. I let her stand for a little while on the footpath but she didn't move, just swayed, seemed unsure what to do, so I took her back in my arms and we watched. For those last couple of days all she really seemed to want was to be held. I sat for hours on end, just sat with her in the armchair, moving as little as possible, and then laid her between us in bed at bedtime. N brought whatever I needed. I tried a couple of times to take her to the toilet or to water or food when I thought she'd be ready, but actually she complained when I did this. She was, despite her great stillness, still capable of standing and taking steps when she wanted. I wasn't sure until she showed us, but she could still initiate movement, and so I learned to just wait for that and help her to her bowl or litter then. Otherwise we just sat together, sharing warmth through hours with no greater need. I felt I was storing something for the years ahead. The room grew dark, the room grew light. We were together.

things haven't been quite the same since my dream of being tortured. some time in the few days after that I meditated and it came back, the feeling of the forearm shoved up into my torso and squeezing. It was unbearable. In my head, as it began, panicked shouting - 'not again not again not again'. but it continued, and afterwards left me with the sensation of something being over. maybe of something having been killed. something specific, which used to reside on the left side of my face, below my eye, close to my nose.

"More grateful 'tis at times (for Nature craves
No artifice nor luxury), if forsooth
There be no golden images of boys
Along the halls, with right hands holding out
The laps ablaze, the lights for evening feasts,
And if the house doth glitter not with gold
Nor gleam with silver, and to the lyre resound
No fretted and gilded ceilings overhead,
Yet still to lounge with friends in the soft grass
Beside a river of water, underneath
A big tree's boughs, and merrily to refresh
Our frames, with no vast outlay- most of all
If the weather is laughing and the times of the year
Besprinkle the green of the grass around with flowers."

Lucretius, from On the Nature of Things, tr William Ellery Leonard

classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.2.ii.html

"Mild is the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts
With choicest boons her human worshippers.
How vigorous now the athletic form of age!
How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!
Where neither avarice, cunning, pride or care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformity
On all the mingling lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth!
How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy.

Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,
Fearless and free the ruddy children play,
Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows
With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
There rust amid the accumulated ruins
Now mingling slowly with their native earth:
There the broad beam of day, which feebly once
Lighted the cheek of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, now freely shines
On the pure smiles of infant playfulness:
No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair
Peals through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes
Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment are resonant around.

The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more
The voice that once waked multitudes to war
Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond
To the death dirge of the melancholy wind:
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast,
So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing!
Even as a corpse that rests beneath their wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To-day, the breathing marble glows above
To decorate its memory, and tongues
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.
These ruins soon leave not a wreck behind:
Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe,
To happier shapes are moulded, and become
Ministrant to all blissful impulses:
Thus human things are perfected, and earth,
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Is strengthened in all excellence, and grows
Fairer and nobler with each passing year."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from The Daemon of the World: A Fragment 

an "iBook" edition - no details. 

What is the authority of a draft?

It has been suggested to me that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", and as I work (so very very slowly) on revising "Soft Shroud" (working title, working body...) I have that thought in mind. Not as something I accept, but as a kind of irritant. Sand for the oyster, or maybe just sand for the sandwich. I am asking myself - what is the authority of the draft?

And of this draft, which I dug out of sustained physical attention to felt sense within particular musical environments (especially the Animal Collective's Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (also Fall Be Kind)) that I chose to hold particular emotion & event environments (Charlie's death, bankruptcy, Grafton) that were for me totally experientially bound together.

None of that is nothing to me. It took me quite a long time to see how much was NOT carried in what I had written - I had to wait until my immersion fell away again, but still the territory and its signs are so personally infused that it is hard for me to step outside it.

When I think that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", I think the alternative is to be present (outside of myself) to what the words are on the page now, to let go of their personal histories and be fully conscious of them, independent but intact. But I can't. I can't be somewhere other than my body and its memories, which have emptied into words. And I can't eradicate my own purpose without losing too much. The purpose is not to convey experience as it happened. The purpose is to make an immersion (not just be in an immersion) that vibrates at the same frequency as the frequency I was in (physically, compositionally) in relation to those experiences.

It sounds easy to come to this but it has not been obvious to me at all.

What if the draft knows more than me now, rather than less than me now? And what if my role is not to cut it away from its moorings,  but to move into those, to know that I don't understand them but they are 'mine', as in, the experience's? This would not be 'the mooring of starting out', but of a kind of backwards-forwards, which is very much the direction of the poem. A ship moving backwards, prow pointing back, into a night that's just like water.

I was at JH's place in Sydney, and KA was there. It seemed like the two of them were reversed in their affections for me, with JH distant and dismissive, and KA warm and friendly. We were swimming in J's indoor swimming pool. She noted I had helped with the design, the decision to have a waterfall flow from the centre of the house to the centre of the pool. Otherwise I was, and they were, aware of my uselessness, lots of errors I had made on things that should have been simple.

Swimming in the pool there was talk of babies, I think K introduced me to one of hers in her arms, and asked encouragingly about our attempts. I said we'd only been trying for a few months, I wasn't worried.

As I swam bits of detritus stuck to me. A large glob of bloody mucus was stuck hard to my right big toenail, and I spent a long time trying to rub it away. 

"Great isosceles wasps flew up from below. The pretty dawn of evening preceded me, its eyes on the heaven of my eyes, without turning round. Thus do ships lie down in the silver storm."

Andre Breton, from "Soluble Fish". 

"She lifted the cup to her lips; her fingers ached, the water smelled of metal polish. She felt a thin hard form comb through her hair pricking her scalp and coming down towards her spine pushing her belly out more. She could feel him looking at her again."

Romesh Gunesekera, from "Batik", Monkfish Moon.

"Sunset is a good time to arrive in this part of the world..."

Romesh Gunesekera, from "Captives", Monkfish Moon. 

A softer bed, that my mother has a softer bed, that she walks beside a river with the sound of purposeful water on hard round stones, water running hard and stones pale grey, her feet secure around the stones' curves, jandals, round stones spread across the full open valley, current strong and there's so much room for water. 

"Syllables:
                    they ripen in the mind,
flower in the mouth.
                                     Their roots
drink night, eat light.
                                     Languages:
trees incandescent
with leaves of rain.

Lightning vegetation,
geometries of echoes:
on a sheet of paper
the poem builds itself
                                     as the day
on the palm of space."


Octavio Paz, from "The Daily Fire"

I'm getting N's sister to teach a workshop on my behalf. I've done this before. She's barely literate. I ask her if she's up to rewriting the details on the promotional material and she's not, so I do it.

I'm in class, one of the last classes of the semester and I've forgotten all my students' names. I ask them to say their names so I can take the roll and they start being really disruptive and rude. I consult with a colleague who's in the class and he says it's because I forgot their names.

I'm driving with N's family down into a valley. It used to be so quiet and secluded here but since they put the new road in there's heavy traffic, even though it's still green, with many large trees. The van is full of students, large boys, kind of hostile to me. At some point I realise no one is driving the van - I'm in the passenger seat. I want one of them to climb over from the back as I'm blocked by luggage - we're still in motion - but they won't so I start to climb over myself. There are a couple of very tall young men walking out of the woods towards the van - they are bullies and I have to turn the van around and get out of there. I seem to pull off this quite extreme driving manoeuvre. There are bullies in the van too though.  

spare me the niggling pain, the tension the distractions, the tension, the rigidity the misery, the lame puns the frozen titles, spare me the hours going round and round the same words without moving anything, without breaking into clean water and new ground. if I were someone else I'd say throw it away, write it from memory, from a different place, give yourself peace and rest somehow, let it go then start again. but I'm not and I want to finish it here and now. want it to be different and exactly the same. 

"Granted that we have gradually started on the reverse movement, there is no little probability in th deduction, based on the continuous decay in the belief in the Christian god, to the effect that there also already exists a considerable decay in the human consciousness of owing (ought); in fact, we cannot shut our eyes to the prospect of the complete and eventual triumph of atheism freeing mankind from all this feeling of obligation to their origin, their causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence complement and supplement each other.
   So much for my rough and preliminary sketch of the interrelation of the ideas "ought" (owe) and "duty" with the postulates of religion. I have intentionally shelved up to the present the actual moralisation of these ideas (their being pushed back into the conscience, or more precisely the interweaving of the bad conscience with the idea of God), and at the end of the last paragraph used language to the effect that this moralisation did not exist, and that consequently these ideas had necessarily come to an end, by reason of what had happened to  their hypothesis, the credence in our "creditor," in God. The actual facts differ terribly from this theory. It is with the moralisation of the ideas "ought" and "duty," and with their being pushed back into the bad conscience, that comes the first actual attempt to reverse the direction of the development we have just described, or at any rate to arrest its evolution; it is just at this juncture that the very hope of an eventual redemption has to put itself once for all into the prison of pessimism, it is at this juncture that the eye likes to recoil and rebound in despair from off an adamantine impossibility, it is at this juncture that the ideas "guilt" and "duty" have to turn backwards - turn backwards against whom? There is no doubt about it; primarily against the "debtor," in whom the bad conscience now establishes itself, eats, extends and grows like a polypus throughout its length and breadth, all with such virulence, that at last, with the impossibility of paying the debt, there becomes conceived the idea of the impossibility of paying the penalty, the thought of its inexpiability (the idea of "eternal punishment") - finally, too, it turns against the "creditor," whether found in the causa prima of man, the origin of the human race, its sire, who henceforth becomes burdened with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "determination of the will"), or in Nature from whose womb man springs, and on whom the responsibility for the principle of evil is now cast ("Diabolisation of Nature"), or in existence generally, on this logic an absolute white elephant, with which mankind is landed (the Nihilistic flight from life, the demand for Nothingness, or the opposite of existence, for some other existence, Buddhism and the like) - till suddenly we stand before that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that stroke of genius called Christianity: - God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God as the one being who can deliver man from what man had become unable to deliver himself - the creditor playing scapegoat for his debtor, from love (can you believe it?), from love of his debtor!..."
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

dream without sequence. charlie's dead, charlie's head - double sized, next to his head. he's sick, he's getting sick, you've got that illness too. mum. in a car in wellington rolling backwards towards the bank. scrambling for the handbrake. we're going over the edge, going to tumble down the bank. mum's head in my hands, i love you, i miss you so much, i love you. i have time to say this. simone come for a swim with me. in the beautiful sea. it's too big. in the swimming pool. fishing dead leaves out of the centre of the pool. dead leaf in my throat. this one folded up like origami, dried leaf unfolding. did it really come out of my throat? yes, it feels warm. 

Two dreams last night. In one I was getting off the bus at our new home. It was am empty, stripped out shop-house on a main road in a small town - bare concrete, damp, no interior walls. I was angry that we were going to live here. But when I went inside I discovered that while I was away that day N had built a prefab wall in to make things more comfortable, so there was at least a separation between the front windows, the toilet and the sleeping area.

The second dream was out the back of the same place? In a kind of storage area. I opened a bag of kittens and they started spilling out. I realised only then how very very young they were - just born. Actually there were cats all over the place - I couldn't keep track of all the cats and somehow I needed to. Eventually on one shelf I opened a bag and saw the little black face of a cat sleeping. I immediately felt surprise relief to recognise Bella. Could I have been mistaken? But she lifted her sleepy face to me to say hello and I knew we were right in our recognition. Relief. 

saturday:

another in the long series of goodbye letters
finger grated on the fancy new grater
brown spots under the leaves of one of the oncidium orchids - do I cut it, is it too late?
pain all through meditation - in the front of my neck, as though I'm being squashed, in the middle of my back like a hinge on my spine
dancehall hip grinds, everything opens
beautiful rageful poem from a student
I read my own poems, too quiet, nothing lands anywhere
wild christian woman comes to witness, speaks about her different path, her time volunteering in Israel
George Trakl in the cab on the way home with groceries, I'm full of rage, can't bear sitting there, but nothing to say.

today I think I had the nicest teaching experience I've ever had. a student came back to my office, frustrated that he can't get a handle on his project. when he engages with the philosophers he is interested in, his personal voice - his bodily experience of time and space - gets obliterated. I showed him an arthur yap poem and as we read it he started to cry with relief. it was another's voice, articulating exactly the problem he had been caught in for months. I handed him the book and told him just to clear everything else away and live with that for a while. He looked like he had finally been granted sleep. 

working on a contents page for soft shroud.

1.    grafton bridge (seed site)

earth pocket cosied w suicides, dream-grads recomposing to a humusphere thick against, and all around, felt-concrete (the poured-set lids of saved-up violence; angry empty ones who swung). I dreamed forward to dream back to lower the body (one example) &        how did you understand this death? were there accounts?

                                    

                            debt?

                            - not debt - I mean death -  sorry, my                                                                               accent                         

                           

2.    hash house hole

vacuum forensicals: how did you understand

horizon type: genealogical. characters: me, others. I mean, Dad keep-him-safe, Nan as a girl riding to a dance,

Charlie after death as the body of a baby,

refugees.

law: Knifebeaks presiding over

the migration across the splintered floodland. 

            event: a body is lowered.