Difficult Memories

This is going to be hard. He won't divorce me, though we separated 14 years ago and he has been living Common Law with another woman for 13 years. I've been browsing my old journals that I brought out of storage recently. Yesterday I posted a 'found' poem from lines and images found in some journals from 1980. The ones I have been dipping into tonight are harder. A thesis I didn't finish. The death of my beloved father. Marriage, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps out of a strange love, who knows anymore. It's not as if none of this happened before we were married.

Friday, August 30, 1985.

10:55am

For the first time I watched one of B's violent episodes manifest.

Last weekend, when he was changing the kitty litter in the basement washroom, he accidentally knocked one of the 'arms' on the toilet roll holder. With sharp anger he suddenly kicked the whole thing, tearing it off the wall. I said, "You idiot," and got out of the way fast. At dinner on Monday, he told me about telling the bear story [from a camping trip] to a man at work,  and how he thumped his desk suddenly with his hands --womp!-- at the moment of his telling about hearing the bear and how that man jumped. I did, too, as he mimetically smashed the table we were sitting at, making it jump. Visiting C and S, they were relating C's problems with S's grandfather visiting from England in that he excluded C from family photos because he wasn't of the "D's [family's] line." B said, "I would tell him to FUCK OFF," as he suddenly punched the air with  a force that would have knocked anyone cold had they been the recipient of it. C and S were noticeably, but momentarily, alarmed at B's violent motion. Last night B and I were haggling over household bills as we entered the last 10 months' collection on SuperCalc. At one point, he flung a binder of mine with a calculator in it on the floor, causing all the contents, even those in small pockets to fly out. I grabbed it and lightly tapped him for doing that so needlessly. Oh boy. He stood up on the couch and began punching me, my chest, my arm. I started shouting, "You have no control! Stop it!!" while fending off his blows. He shouted that he hated me. I continued, "Just because you feel weak and powerless sometimes do you think that beating up your wife is going to make you feel stronger?!"

"You bitch," he frothed, still punching me.

"How can you do this to the woman you love?" I shouted as I tried to defend myself. "Alright!" I stopped, "If you want to beat me up, go ahead and do it!!" Without an opponent, he subsided. He doesn't like the image of himself as a wife-beater. Ever since I began using this tactic it has invariably diffused his violence. I don't get nearly so bruised or bloodied, which is a relief, because if I don't somehow diffuse his attacks they are terrible. He has no in-built mechanism for controlling himself.

Afterward I just cried and cried. He refused to talk about what had just happened, but did 'make up.' I sent him off to buy cigarettes and continued crying, feeling sorry for myself, wondering how I had ever gotten into such a relationship.

There's more, of course... many paragraphs. Then, at 3:00pm that day I wrote:

How I dislike writing about these fights. Who wants to commit this sort of thing to paper? I hate myself for doing it -- what if someone were to inadvertently read what I write here.... I do it because I'm confused by these extremes, these violent episodes, and... try to understand. I can't talk about what goes on to anyone.
_

Why did I feel I had to hide what was going on from everyone? Why was I ashamed? He blamed me for his anger. Perhaps I was trying to heal him; perhaps I didn't believe in my own worth. It is now 26 years later, and still I struggle to speak.

                              

La Luna: a draft of the poem

A poem I composed from lines found in three of my tightly written, packed journals from 1980. I may or may not use it as the voiceover poem in the video of the crazy moon I'm playing with presently.

La Luna

razors of lightning press my eyelids
your white love, the pearl shell seas
the sky peels back like a scroll
you are mine, unsplitted, fleshless

cornucopias, hot-bed undersea growths of things
joined to other things in sections, in shell lines

mad shadows. my blood is full of alcohol

memory is internally roused, without evasion

I open the door to your shadowed face, dark hair, beard-
those fluid sea-algae, jade-green eyes
do they absorb or reflect light?

light is a tumbling ball
the moon is a lunatic
there is a lady on the telegraph pole

each man or woman who enters has to leave
their personality behind like tossed clothes

pastel lightning crosses the sky
the moon is a fetish
a fat, marshmallow moon
the moon contemplates itself
a blood moon

words are a wash of waves;
waves of a ceaseless alphabet

my throat is a silent, howling hyena
the illness of passion

I've been caught

where is the land; where is the vessel?

lapped wind and frothed cloud
mutant moon
- a glowing field of electrical fabric -

vision is dangerous

this fragile moon letter of white light

the white imagination that you have to travel
through the prism to get to

when I'm in love I'm outside of what
I'm inside of the rest of the time



I follow the moon
am nothing but motion
...............following
streets marked by lights
as round as moons

am nothing
but shadows of light

as the moonlight
careens drunkenly in the sky

shrouds hide me
while the moon dances

a hallucinated ball

of white wind

shorn of darkness
dance naked night
my eyes flutter
in the tops of trees

spirits gather and flee

you have gone



direct link: La Luna

Music by Arnold Wohler, 'Larghetto espressivo' from his album, "Quintett für Flöte, Geige, Gitarre, Klavier und Cello in 5 Sätzen."

                              

La Luna -no poem, draft videopoem-

direct link: La Luna -no poem

Last night I went out and videoed the full moon for a different video poem (Wear White Paint for the Moon), and I got some nice footage for that project. This little clip was, oh, enticing. I've played with it a bit. I think including the text in the video this time, and perhaps a voiceover, or not, I don't know. The up close might be a bit hard to watch, yet I could put words in those sections, or filter it somehow. I like that it's really only clearly the moon in the last few frames.

May not even call this La Luna. Haven't written the poem yet, but many notes surround me, old journals, my current Moleskine notebook, scribbles, thoughts...

Music by Arnold Wohler, 'Larghetto espressivo' from his album, "Quintett für Flöte, Geige, Gitarre, Klavier und Cello in 5 Sätzen."

                              

Wind Over Grass

Wind Over Grass, 2009, 14"x10.5", 35.5cmx26.5cm, India ink (with a dip pen), and oils (paint and pastel) on a primed canvas sheet. I based a larger painting on this, which is included in the photo album, Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass.

The figures in this drawing were originally from a drop-in life drawing session in 2005! After some years I transferred the sketch to a small primed canvas sheet. Then lines of bright oil paint, which I rubbed out to a pastel hue. That hung on a wall in the hall for a few years. Yesterday I grabbed it, deciding I couldn't stand seeing it anymore, and if I wrecked it, the garbage would be fine. Wetted water-soluble oil pastels, clumsier than brushes, but colour-bright, follow those lines of force, curves of bodies and landscape. Then my dip pen, old trusty pen, and a bottle of permanent India ink. No going back! No rubbing out! Don't spill the ink! I move it around my crowded desk, trying to keep an envelope under it, scratching lines in, over and over, a wind of lines flowing. I am in a trance almost, another state of consciousness, more primal, less 'thought'-ful, empty, an energy of muted frenzy emerging from the pen tip. I am not-me. I pass the point of no return. Then stop. I'm happier with the drawing, in the flush of finishing, but who knows?

Contact dance - the points of tension in the parts of your bodies that touch, and the flow of energy so that you know where the motion, the flow, your combined flow, is going. It is about the touch, and the space between you, and the flow of intuitive movement. Wind Over Grass is an exercise where one person stands as a blade of grass and the other runs to them as wind and gently touches them, anywhere on their body, touching lightly with any part of their body, the side of the palm, chin, back of the shoulder. The grass bends, sways, curves. Then stands upright as again the wind sweeps in again.

When we practice Wind Over Grass, our bodies become part of the landscape. Two years after I last worked on this drawing, it didn't hit the garbage, but is back on the wall in the hall. Hopefully, with lines of telluric energy finally moving.

All the previous drawings are here, as well as a painting that I began, but haven't finished, that's sitting on another wall (le sigh): Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass.