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.