I've been preoccupied with eruption today. I tend to visualize physical disorders. Appendicitus is my present fear. I don't think I really have it, but the suspense of imagining - "What if I did have appendicitus" has kept me wavering between perverse fascination and a dizzying nausea. As others describe the symptoms to me I begin to feel them:

"Yes, I have a pain on the lower right side of my stomach. Yes, it is sensitive to the touch."

"All the time?"

"Well yes, everytime I touch it."

I imagine an atomic bomb exploding inside of my stomach. Internal machinery begins to slow up, contracting from the smoke which contains thousands of microscopic poisonous particles which have erupted from my appendix and are rapidly spreading themselves through the channels of vessels, and corpuscles, muscle tissue and membrane, gastrointestinal, ingestive and colonic regurgitative structures. A ray of heat spears my stomach and I wonder if this is what an appendix feels like when it has erupted. My heart beats in the spot where a vacant hole might be if a chunk of me is removed. A high pitched fluid travels through my veins instead of blood.

Estoy en el estado de Chiapas en el pais de Mexico. My legs approach crumbling stones sunken into the side of a steep hill. The feet on my legs grind stones to hoist me up. The sun pulses directly over my head. I have reached the top. I fit into the curved back of a stone- carved lion with open mouth silently roaring at rainforest ruinas, site of once held rituals. I am hypnotized by the rippling hum of Palenque dragonflies. A river of sound engulfs me. I disappear with the current. Feverish visions of sun sacrifices fill my eyes. I yield my body to the trance and at this point feel my back against the cushion of my couch, the lamp light in my eyes.

Walking through the city in the rain I see tropical mirages. Imagine I am walking between towering palm trees into blue and orange sky. I want to be swallowed by another language.

I have an image of Virginia Woolf walking into the sea. The lips of the sea open and permit her to enter it's mouth. She is swallowed. The waves close forming a kiss.

Dream

I was awake in my dream, discussing my dream of rocket ship sculptures with Voy. Circular dreams are difficult to tell. Being awake and dreaming were continuous, a whirl of watercolor boundaries.

My first day in art school. Upon leaving I was asked for my key. "What key?" I said to the towering student who blocked the door. "Your key to the school," he responded. I told him that I was new and that I wasn't familiar with the procedures. It seemed odd to give him my key. Why should I give him my key? Suddenly I realized that I did have a key, but I vowed to myself that I wouldn't give it to this person.

He told me that it was standard procedure to take everyone's keys at the end of the day. Someone reluctantly gave him their key and said that tomorrow she wouldn't allow him to take it.

I lied and said that my key had not yet been made. He said he would have to check. I asked him if he couldn't please let me leave for just one day without giving him the key. He seemed willing to relent, but first he explained the reason for his obstinancy. Anything could happen to a person between the time they left the school at the end of the day and the time they returned the next day. A person could go mad or become violent and destructive within the space of hours. If a person had gone insane while away from the school and this person had a key then he/she could return to the school and destroy it. This was the reason the keys were taken at the end of the day. Madness lay close to freedom. The artists might forget how to channel their creative energy. Losing this ability could at any moment make them become neurotics.

In a very large gallery were two rocket ships. These sculptures, when entered, simulated the experience of ascension without ever leaving the ground. There were four stages one had to complete to experience total ascension. I was with my friend George in a gallery on West Broadway. The gallery belonged to the art school. We entered one of the ships. I wondered whether the experience was the same in both rockets. The first stage was in progress. Computer lights were flashing next to switchboards, meters and dials. Electronic buzzing filled the compartment and we waited. We looked up and saw two people beginning the second stage. Even though we were not conducting this second level we felt the reverberations and sensations of eruptions - bubbling and smoke - as if we were these other two people. The feeling was all encompassing, a tubular cinema with sound in every inch and us in the center.

Voy and I were either in a very large studio apartment or we were spending the night in a gallery. The rocket sculptures were veiled. I wanted to travel with him to the fourth stage. It was late at night. The sound from stage two would have awakened the neighborhood, but we wanted to travel. Suddenly a man stuck his head through the back door and asked to use our phone. "Of course," we said. He came in and began typing. Voy and I exchanged puzzled looks, which the man caught and he said, "It's rough," and we agreed.

Voy and I had a map of an art exhibit which spanned miles. It was like a treasure hunt or an archeological dig. We were at some crossroads in a flat farmland area. We didn't know how to get to our next location, which happened to be the place where the rockets were being exhibited. We still wanted to experience reaching the fourth stage.

We saw a sign which showed the distance of the location and the name was in french, Rue de Louvecienne. We didn't know whether this location was in another country and we didn't know the route. It was 2pm. We wanted to arrive by eight in the evening. We had six hours to walk 6000 miles. We walked to a gas station and asked for a map. The owner only had frankfurters for free and no maps. As we were leaving a trailer the size of a train pulled up next to us. A very friendly man asked us if we could tell him where his friend was. We asked him why he thought we, two strangers, knew where his friend was. We said it might help if he could give us a name. The man smiled and said that he was looking for Tammy Wynette and that she was waiting for his wife and family in a room at the Science Center at the University. "What luck you have," we told him, "we used to work security there, we know every room's location." The man and his very friendly wife got out of the trailer to shake our hands and introduced us to their family. Before they introduced themselves I realized who they were and I was just about to tell Voy when the man said, "Hi, I'm Roy Rogers and this is my wife Dale, we'd like you to meet the family." There was nothing we could say. We walked to the back of the trailer and met twelve children of different ages and nationalities. I thought the whole situation was absurd and decided to join the absurdity. I began talking in a southern accent to Voy. I said that I sure did admire anyone who travelled all the way up east from Tulsa, Oklahoma, or anyone who even got up east from Oklahoma. Takes a mighty strong will, I said.

Voy and I were stranded in Oklahoma for three days at a truck stop last summer. Sheer irony.

La tarea

TIME

Qué hora es?

Son las siete y media.

Todavía es temprano para acotarse.

Mi trabajo es una porqueria.

POSSESSION

El dinero no es de tuyo, es del jefe.

FOR WHOM SOMETHING IS DESTINED

Esta carta es para mí.

Esta bolsa es " ".

SUBSTANCE OR MATERIAL

Los sobres y los sellos son de papel.

ORIGIN

Friduchita es de México.

IMPERSONAL EXPRESSION

Es estupendo tener tanto confianza.

Es raro encontrar un hombre como él.

WITH NOUNS AND PRONOUNS

Mi hermano es un estudiante.

El gran peligro es el frío.

Eres tú Matilde?

Dream

I was in a car with my family. It was a winter night. They were going home and so was I . My father stopped the car on a residential street some distance from our house. My parents said that they would leave me here, in the middle of a snowy boulevard lined with large houses, because I could hitchhike home.

On the street I walk around as if I were an ant in a farm zig-zagging through cars, people, streets. The grossness of New York sems to weigh me down today, I feel very small, a somber snail. I feel as if my body is so burdened by such a concentration of enormity in buildings, moving walls of people, cacaphony of sounds, everything leaping, running, shouting in different directions at once that I could become a giant drill spinning so fast that I could burrow into the ground, then stop. Nothing, dead, a petrefied tree, hard, brittle. People put on set faces and acquire determined strides in the city. To be soft is to be trampled. My good moods and smiles for the world are sliced by scowls and indifferent stares. Desperation is everywhere. From the nervous mouse glances of men in business suits at their watches to the gray-colored men and women who possessively carry bags and bags of garbage. Misery weighs me down, pulls my head from a cloud of abstraction. Oppression is everywhere, seen and unseen.Walking toward the subway with stuffed purse on one shoulder, falling pad of newsprint under my arm and box of supplies in my hand I wonder: "Is this what I really want? Could I spend my life doing this?" But in the quiet of the apartment. I realize that clumsiness and frustrations are only diversions. My conviction to create something is strengthened when a woman bumps into my sketchpad and snarls in a crowded subway. I look at the people dangling from hand grips at the top of the car. Above me is a man with angry lines engraved in his face, a permanent scowl. People coming back from dull 9-to-5 office jobs whose happiest moment is when they get a seat on the train. They hate their jobs, but still shove on through pallid days and don't know its raining, always pouring sorrow. Or maybe they do.The lower west side of Manhattan seems to be covered with a transparent sheet of gray. Neon lights pulsate, thumping in eerie shades of yellow and pink. Buildings seem sandwiched together. Streets become dark and very narrow. Too narrow for all of the people on them, or too narrow for anyone. Because the atmosphere is one of secrecy, darkness, things either recede or leap out at one. Voices of men in doorways leap out onto the sidewalk while their bodies remain in shadows. Musty sidestreet hotel odors leap out to choke. Corpse complexioned whores with sagging flesh and pasty black eyelashes drooping under the weight of mascara leap out. Everything else is hidden by murky windows and anything could be crawling nearby. Arriving at Fifth Avenue daylight reappeared.Strange that as I was limping home with silkscreens in each hand a black man should stop me and tell me to be true to my roots because they grow deep. What he did not know was that my roots go very deep and very far. I can picture tracing my "roots" and never stopping because they would wrap around and cradle the world. I don't want to be blinded by a narrow definition of what it is to be black. I don't put my faith in empty slogans or populist phrases. You hear black people talking about "remember Malcolm." "All praise be to Allah." "Praise Malcolm." "As Salaam Alaikum." These very "righteous" people don't seem to remember what Malcolm's thinking had come to before he was murdered, that the Islam he witnessed in Mecca consisted of people with a spectrum of skin colors worshipping together. Since the Black Power movement of the sixties some black people seem to be programmed to transmit a particular line. Not a Communist Party line, but a bold and black line. This is of course the most correct black line, which veers to the left implying left-wing affinities. But, many times I find all of these lines missing the point for today, now, 1979. Is there any one point or line? Point, line, plane? Kandinsky, right? On TV you can watch "The Jeffersons" strut to the show's theme song, "Movin' On Up." There seems to be an obsession these days to achieve to achieve to achieve. To achieve what?

"I don't know man, but I gotta keep pushing upwards."

"But, up where bro'? What's up there?"

"I don't know man, but I gotta keep moving."

When middle class security, that yummy piece of the pie, is achieved no one cares, no one is there, others have been removed through gradual heterogenous forms of annihilation and this person on this frozen treadmill is alone. My version of Beckett.

I sink further into my own thoughts, reveries, falling away from people around me, or rather than sink should I say I soar into another world where no one else can enter, unless they are of this distant world. This sounds like I'm autistic.

I feel that I understand the straggly haired, dirty woman leaning against the streetlight pole on the corner, screaming, ranting about someone who did her wrong. You scream and still no one hears you, so it doesn't matter. You continue to scream.

* * * *

Dream

I dreamt about political prisoners. I had an idea for a story, play, film, piece? Time - being lost in time and not remembering which particular cause the prisoners were jailed for. All causes and all oppression meshed together. The people could become any one from the past or future or present. The feeling was that of science fiction.*

La tarea

WHERE

El cartero está en la calle.

WITH WHOM

El empleado no está solo; esta con el jefe.

GERUND - ando, iendo

Estoy trabajando mucho.

en - usually use with 'estar'

de - " " " 'ser'

EXCEPTION: 'Ser' is used with 'en' when it means 'to take place. 'La escena es en Madrid. Ella esta en las classe. Él es de Mexico o de Puerto Rico.

Two Mondays ago I was arrested at Wall St. for protesting corporate investments in nuclear power. Last Tuesday I was officially withdrawn from art school because my tuition has not yet been paid. Thursday I begged to be readmitted. The president granted me one week to get my financial records in order. Today is Monday. My mother just got out of the hospital after several weeks. I was told only vague reasons for the hospitalization - refusal to eat or fasting, mental exhaustion. Mother's mother, grandmother, leaves the house and rides buses out of the city and is then picked up by the police. She turns the gas on ovens without lighting them and walks away in a daze.

Dream

On a metal slab with wheels pulled by a truck were girls/women among whom I was one. We were taken to the bus terminal and loaded into buses. We were going to a place in the country - a large cabin? It was one large room rather like a cell where we all slept, separate from the men. I was standing up trying to orient myself to the surroundings when Mark from art school came into the room, accused me of something and shot me in the ribs. At first I felt nothing, then pain began to swell. I saw that there was a hole in my sweater and my shirt and my flesh. Blood didn't gush, but slowly dripped out. I told a few people around me what had happened and that I needed to go to an infirmary or have some sort of medical attention, but nothing happened.I continued to go on with my activities in spite of this hole punctured in my body. There was a woman who seemed to be in charge of the group. She told me to go to another room and get her coat and that in front of it were two onions, which she told me I should also bring. I went there and looked at the onions. Suddenly one exploded. It was a bomb. I was still standing there in a blown up room looking at the one remaining onion. I stuck a straw in it to feel its juice. A feeling of doom crept over me and I felt that I was going to be blamed for the explosion. I hid in the wreckage and went back to the large room at night. I didn't want to be noticed. The next thing I remember was that a very large balloon was taking off with the matrons, there were now two women who were in charge. They beckoned to me to get in and float away in the balloon, but I refused. They went higher and higher and then the balloon burst. I felt relieved and free.

La tarea

VOCABULARI

Osangre - blood

a sangre fría - in cold blood

horripilante - bloodcurdlings

abueso - bloodhound

envenenamiento de la sangre - blood poisoning

presión arterial - blood pressure

crudeza - crudity

crucificar - to crucify

bisojo - cross-eyed

corneja - crow

encarnizado - bloodshot

sangriento - bloody

regla - rule

volarse - to blow up

inspeccionar - to oversee

sospechoso - suspicious

barbaro - barbarous

bufonesco - clownish

perplejo, desconcertador - baffling

Dream

I had a dream which involved my father and a car on the edge of an ocean. The most vivid part of the dream was when a wave swept the shore where the car was perilously balanced and took the car away to the middle of the ocean. I went after the car and got to the middle of the of ocean and realized I couldn't swim. My father came to rescue me and when he came we moved toward the shore and I was able to touch the ocean floor with my toes, and then with my feet. I could walk and pull the car back to the shore after he had assisted me.

La tarea

Algunas veces tengo ganas de escribir cuentos horripilantes que traten de los oficinistas que trabajan en las Páginas Amarillas. Las oficinistas son obesas y su actitud resulta sospechosa. Creen que tienen autoridad real en la oficina y en el mundo entero pero esta creencia no es más que una ilusión.Imaginé que las mujeres eran buitres que iban tras mi sangre. Proximo capítulo: ella deja su trabajo.

Books to Read

Zelda ; Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel, Sharon Spencer; Hopscotch, Cortezar; Artaud, Bettina Knapp; Anna Balakian, book on surrealism ; Andrª Breton, in french, Fran°oise D' Eaubonne; Violette Le Duc, La Batarde ; Anna Kavan, Ice and Asylum Pieces and The House of Sleep ; Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (Joyce) "She is our Joyce," Anais Nin;The Sweet Death of Candor, Hannah Lee; George Sand journals and biography by Maurois; Colette - Maude Hutchins - Marienne Hauser - Ishmael, The Legend of Casper Hauser - Wasserman - Gaston Bachelard

Notes

From Moments of Being - Virginia Woolf

She believed individual identity was always in flux:

"{E}very moment changes its shape in response to the forces surrounding it: forces which were invisible emerge, and others sink silently below the surface and the past on which the identity of the present rests is never static, never fixed like a fly in amber, but as subject to alteration as the consciousness that recalls it.""If life then is 'a bowl which one fills and fills and fills' each new experience added to the existing ones displaces them ever so slightly and alters their previous meaning by forcing them into new combinations."

La tarea

WRITE SENTENCES IN EL PRETÉRITO

La semana pasada me leí un libro sobre la vida de un hombre llamado. Éste se marchó un día a buscar su legado. Cuando emprendió el viaje pensaba que su cometido consistiría solamente en ayudar al viejo que le había enseñado todo sobre la vida y el mundo cuando él era aún un jovenzuelo. Sin embargo, su cometido resultó ser más complicado de lo previsto.

WRITE SENTENCES USING 'HABER'

Me he acabado de leer un libro. He estado leyendo sobre un hombre llamado John que se marchó un buen día a buscar su legado. Antes de haber empezado el viaje John ya se había planteado que su cometido sólo habría de consistir en ayudar al viejo que le había enseñado todo sobre la vida cuando él era aún un jovenzuelo. Sin embargo su cometido acab§ siendo más complicado de lo que esperaba en un principio.

Dream

I wish I could have written this down immediately after waking. My feelings now are less strong. I can only remember the most prominent part. The dream involved some political affair. I remember many people, decisionmakers perhaps, sitting around a round table with a circle in the center in which a person could stand and give an address. President Carter was in the center. He was voicing a proclamation, a new decision. The decision had to do with changing the present political and economic system (capitialist) for a new communally-based system. Everyone around the table approved. They were all quite please and felt that the decision would improve life. Then I, with a crayon in my hand began to write on the table top. I walked around the entire table, which was expansive, writing until the table was filled. I seemed to be in another state of consciousness while writing, unconscious. There was no barrier between my conscious act of writing and the messages flowing from my unconscious. I wrote predictions about the future state of human beings, I predicted chaos where this new proclamation had hoped for order. I wrote that a new socio-political-economic system would alter nothing. Human relations would continue as they had since time in memoriam. Hate would continue to be manifest and atrocities against people and nature would continue. The secret to change, I believe I wrote this on the table, was not in new systems, but rather in the individual. If the individual was discontent within themselves these discontents could only be multiplied, even if a new system were implemented.

Later that day while at work I heard on the radio that Carter is being firm about wanting to reinstate the draft. Men and women would be registered this time. I would be eligible. I asked my boss Giancarlo what would happen to me if I were in another country and did not come back to the U.S. to be drafted. He said I could go to jail upon returning to the U.S. or I could become an exile.While standing in the subway car on my way home I heard the tapping of a cane. A blind man was walking directly toward me, shaking a can of coins. I moved out of his path and someone got up and people moved aside and many gave him money. Then from the end of the train I heard a booming voice sing resonantly. Another man with a can of coins seemed to be collecting again to sooth the consciences of those who hadn't given money to the first man. This second man had an incredible tremble-causing voice. Although he sang so boldly, or maybe because he did, no one would look up. He held a sign which said, "MY MOTHER HAS CEREBRAL PALSY AND I AM BLIND IN MY LEFT EYE." He shook the can violently as he continued to walk through the train. The vibrato of his voice and that of the shaking can were one.After these men left I heard talking over my shoulder. A man was arguing with himself behind me. At first I wasn't sure whether he was talking to another person. When he was leaving the subway car I could see the reflection of his face in the window. His lips were rapidly moving. He left.On Saturday I spent four hours with Fellini and on Sunday I spent four and one half hours with Rossellini. The time with Fellini was well spent. I saw "Clowns" and "Casonova" with Voy. "Clowns" was beautiful.

The next day when Voy was talking about the movie I started to think about when I was small and went to the circus. I was reminded of this because the film begins with a little boy (young Fellini) looking out of his bedroom window watching the circus tent being erected. A circus scene is shown with all kinds of clowns doing tricks. The little boy is in the circus crying, his mother slaps him and takes him home. Again he is in his bedroom. His thoughts about the clowns are revealed to us. The clowns weren't funny to him. They were grotesque images which he saw in real life. I remember feeling when I was younger that clowns were very sad. They made me sad and also frightened me. My memories of the circus began returning. I could picture the round arena with three rings, gaudy colors of yellow , orange, red, the bluish light cutting through smoke, the smell of peanuts, cottoncandy and elephants. Sitting in the circus with my father and my friend I watched the high wire artists. My heart beat fast as they balanced on the wire. Their flesh was pale, their costumes glittered. Flashback: A man is climbing, balancing on a very tall thin pole, fragile. He tips over and falls. Shrieks follow, the spotlight moves to another ring, commotion. I am frightened. Did the man die? Is he dead? We leave the circus. I feel sick in my stomach and don't want to talk. On the news when we get home I hear about the accident. The man broke his neck.I kept trinkets from the circus. I was sentimental. I cried when my helium balloons no longer stuck to the ceiling of my bedroom. I had a closet full of shrunken Mickey Mouse head balloons. In my desk drawer I had an autographed photo of Emmett Kelly, the famous clown. The picture was sad or maybe just his eyes were. I kept it in my drawer.

I finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude today. That book has made me even more sensitive to the turns of fate and the repetition which occurs throughout generations. I feel like looking back into the generations of my family. I feel like the last Aureliano, the hermit who, as soon as the mystery of the family history is unraveled in the yellowing parchment manuscript he has spent most of his life deciphering, reads about the end of the family line simultaneous to its ending:

"The first of the line is tied to a tree and last is being eaten by the ants. . .Macando was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertained the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was forseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men (sic.) at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilionia would finish deciphering the parchments and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

I would have liked to be in my grandmother's house one last time. Everything has been moved and different people live there. My parents sold the new people the cloud soft Hollywood bed. In my mind I can picture the house as I last saw it, but now I can never go back to observe what time had done. I feel a sense of loss.

Dream

I dreamt of a tudor-styled house made of stucco. It was my house. It was divided into two parts and I lived in one part, but I don't know who lived in the other part. The house was a home. I don't know if my whole family lived there. The part of the house I lived in was warm and enveloping, like a womb or a tropical climate. The windows were stained glass and light came into the room in broken spectrums. Plants filled the windows. On the floors were plush Persian rugs and the furniture in the room would become one with anyone who sat in it. The room penetrated me when I entered. I felt a serene relief. My mother was in the room. The ceilings were high and a spiral staircase wound up from this pregnant sitting room. All colors were earth tones and the walls were made of dark wood.

La tarea

VOCABULARIO

NOTES TAKEN FROM SPANISH SUBTITLES WHILE WATCHING "TODA VA BIEN" - GODARD

fábrica

pelear

coger; cogerse

sorpresa

dejar ; dejar de ; no dejarse

jodar

hallar

atorado

atenerse

doblega; doblegar(se)

eso no marcha

cautiverio

cadencia

qué harán

plantón

meterlos

degastería

apesta

alrededor

gastar

destrozo

izquierdistas

acordar

compadece

fracasos

secuestrado

échamelos

tantas cosas

marido

matiz

débil

apenas

mientras

asegurar

perdurar

alocaron

tropezaba

gacho

es pura basura

soprendente

bloqueada

inducir

meter mas gente

encima

harto de

jodas (cómo jodes)

el culo

pantalonera

chamba de

cuyas (os)

girar

recharzar (cé)

la locura

escalofríos

aparentar

callarse

asaltado

miedo

mudos

patada

Authors to Read

Bernan

os, Pierre Jean-Jouve, Leon-Paul Fargue, Giraudoux, Simenon, southern writers. Alice Childress, Alice Walker

Sometimes Lyn writes on a roll of adding machine paper, as if it were a scroll. She's not interested in stuffing it into her vagina and pulling it out inch by inch as she reads it to the public, as she's seen a female body artist do.

Scroll

Chemists cannot re-duce her to intelli-gible components theweb of her networksare not decipheredbecause she is a complex compound acatatonic commodity.Can it be possiblethat she retainswithin her construct-tions of bent metalpipes and contortedtubing? At nightit is so. All isturned inward, treksare made throughjagged mind-corridorswhere only she canwalk. She shufflesthrough her past. Its ashes fall likethe residual flakes of abestoes fromdecaying buildings.Carcinogens remain.Behind glass sheetswhich line the wallsare department storemannequins which cometo life with her glance.They reside in anArtaudian mise-en-scene. She is centerstage surrounded byher dream.From the orchestrapit wails music withno melody gone askewbecause the conductoris absent. In his placeis a deaf dancer lostin the whirl of herscarfs, strangled bythe sound of Kandinskycolors.She is no longer incenter stage but ina room with black-eyedSusan walls watchingher every move. It is the room in which hergrandmother sleeps.Careful steps are madetoward the bed. Blan-kets cover a mound ofsagging flesh. Shetouches the blankets,they lift to revealleeches clinging tosheets. No stains orremnants of a life.She turns to find her-self on a city street.In front of her sprintsa man. On his should-er rests a caressinghand. It has no body.Her nose awakens tothe scent of ginger.She inhales more deep-ly. Opening her eyesshe sees only theshadows of bambooshades on the wallsof her dim box apart-ment. Humid air holdsonly the stench ofoverflowing garbage.

Voy had said she wasn't like any girl he'd ever met before, because she was willing to put up with all the difficulties and insecurities of hitchhiking and travelling on a shoestring. What did that make her Lyn wondered? What kinds of girls had he known? What kind of girl was she and why did that designation of herself as a girl sometimes sneak up on her and catch her by surprise. She wasn't quite sure despite having gone to a girl's school, or maybe because of having gone to a girl's schools where girls ruled, what the social definition of being a girl was. She knew the stereotypes, but she wondered what any of this had to do with herself.As she was thinking about all of this she came across some letters Voy had sent her the year before. She was still at the University then and he'd been suspended for stealing wood. He'd wanted to make them a platform bed. His parents allowed him to stay with them during this crisis, although each summer he was always required to find shelter elsewhere since the apartment was always sublet to highly paid young lawyer recruits. Desmond and his mother would then go to Barnstable or abroad until autumn.In retrospect it seemed pretty funny that his desire to create an intimate environment for them had led to her sleeping alone in her one-person unit,which was part of a ten-person unit ( formerly known as a ten-man). Then she was still riding on the feelings that had grown during their road trip. Everything which had happened on the road seemed real, but it was a different kind of reality, not like the day-to-day grind of New York.

Voy's Words

Hi,I don't know where to start. I wish we were in a diner, with coffee and all night to talk. What I have to say wants to burst out all in one moment and I want to place that moment, self-contained, in a bubble and give it to you, so you would understand in an instant all that cannot be articulated in this letter.I don't think the idea of fate, with all its ups and downs, has ever made much of an impression on me, except, perhaps, intellectually. The idea of fate also appears in the tarot deck - The Wheel of Fortune. The design for the card was taken from one of the King Arthur legends. King Arthur dreams that he is sitting on top of a high wheel, where he has been placed by a beautiful woman. The woman asks him what he can see. Arthur replies that he can see the entire world at which point the woman pushes the wheel and spins him to the ground. 'Earthly pride being what it is, she says, everyone has to fall.'I shall reign, I reign, I reigned, I am without rein. I feel tonight that I have learned about the wheel emotionally, not intellectually. I think that it is 'meaningful coincidence' that I just finished reading a book on Isadora Duncan, who wore the wheel out.Do you remember - just a week ago - when I told you that I understood Kerouac's phrase - "everything is fine and allright forever" - I found that phrase beautiful, even though I knew it was not true. It's beautiful because it describes the feeling two people in love must have after they exchange a moment of complete understanding - like the moment I wanted to send you instead of this letter - even when everything is not all right. The moment of love, understanding, between us will give us strength - you understand - when we're apart, and, sadly, everything will be all right and fine, forever.Tonight nothing is right. I am totally confused.After the interview at the Film School was over I started to walk uptown - I decided to walk all the way home, because it did not matter whether I took the subway or walked. I stopped and had a cup of coffee on Broadway and Fourteenth. On Thirty-Fourth St. I took the subway uptown. At 72nd and East End I bought some soil and a pot to replant a palm tree which was dying in our house. I waited for the cross-town bus for a 1/2 hour - oblivious to the people around me - waited, later, twenty minutes for an uptown bus. I chain smoked and I did not smoke. I was oblivious to all the people around me, thinking furiously . . . went to work - stupidly - that night, and fucked up somewhat - but that's not important. I came home and spoke to my mother and Desmond briefly - I had told my mother on the phone everything that had happened at the interview (before I went to work) after, for a long time debating whether I wanted to tell anyone. I decided it wa stupid not to, and in the same instant made up my mind to call you after work.Anyway - I talked to Desmond, who (surprisingly) told me to write O'Connell a letter - after all, it is perfectly all right to tell someone the Film School will not accept him - though from my point of view it is tragic that they wouldn't - but, it is the wordless (literally) and arrogant way he carried out the interview that is in Desmond's words, "unconsionable." Desmond had many other good words as well, all of which I will put into the letter.I went to sleep - luckily escaped having to remember my dreams - decided it was futile going to work - got through the day waiting for night so I could write you this . . . so everything would flow out of me in a giant confessional letter. What I am thinking is this: Your happiness always gets caught up in my meanderings. I seem to crush it unwittingly. How long has it been since we've been happy together? I know my suspension, and now this, have contributed to your unhappiness - but it seems I never give you a chance to express the good - or for that matter - the bad. And love must be a balance.You must have been so excited, after the Art School acceptance, and came to the phone unsuspecting, and before we, together, could celebrate your happiness -

But before we could celebrate your happiness I told you about Film School and then you were in tears, alone in a phone booth and God knows what you were thinking all last night, the shock, the tears you will have cried. I destroyed your moment of pleasure. And I can't yet come and put my arms around you. When I do we can just lie together - with absolutely no discussion of practicality, but rather with complete acceptance of what has happened and total love (I need you so much) I don't want to think about this, it kIlls me emotionally. But the moment will be our satisfaction.I know now all the suffering I have caused you - not so much through my absence, but because I haven't given myself to you completely (when this is, all along, what I have wished to do, because we are still young, still have time . . . )I think this was the gist of you letter(s): I had left you alone, giving you only advertisements for a rosy future, when this is not what you needed. I understood this 100% when I got your letter; for the first time since January, and maybe even the end of last summer when we came back from Mexico, I felt the totality of your presence, and knew what you needed, and that I could give it to you.When I got your letter I heard you - almost as if it were you and I talking together in the intimate conversation you mentioned in the part of your letter where you discussed your dream - actually as we sit in the kitchen talking intensely, it is New York (if New York be a lady) who walks in. I say "Hi" - and later, when I am alone again, to her (New York): "You and I can talk any time now."

I think the totality of a person's presence - mentally, emotionally, mythologically, stupidly, sensually, sexually, Buddha-like, ever christ-like - The special suffering and dignity which comes across in the play, "For Colored Girls" (a play I have not seen, and that won't stop me from mentioning it) and most definately comes across in the faces you used to draw, before you embarked on your abstract period, and in the poems you used to read me. - This totality is what must be exchanged in the moment I keep speaking of, exchanged as much as is humanly possible. Then, despite all real obstacles which block the course of all relationships from their happiest outcome - that is, Nirvana, Paradise (totally impossibe) - everything will be all right.Love is an exchange - we have given each happiness and sadness, and lately, too much sadness. I think I have given you more of that, too.

I am still a silly little boy - Let me tell you about my first impressions of you, because you used to scare me so.You were the sphinx-enigma from a strange land, mysterious, Black Woman - emotional, deep. You were this sphinx, painted black. I was not yet the man in the picture (see enclosed Ingres reproduction) - I didn't have his strength, the serious expression on his face. You had such power over me then. I was intimidated. When you played me your music I though, "Where does she get this from - Gil Scott, Rasaan Kirk?" And all the different emotions of all the different faces that you drew and that hang on your walls are your own. And when you read me poetry each different poem voice emotion was your own too.

Lyn, must stop here for tonight - goodnightHey Baby - I'm back on this old worn out typewriter. I hope you can read the print - today, Friday, a musky, humid day. Just wanted to say Hi.

Went up to the uptown Ivy University yesterday and everything looks copasetic. I can. . .

Two hours later - went out to have a drink with Mary D., who wanted to talk to me immediately about various things - mostly, it turns out, about her new boyfriend. Now that I am home I find that Janie has just arrived, and a long talk is about to begin. So I will write again tomorrow. I am incredibly happy, which is all I really wanted to say. Bueno. Adios,

P.S. What do you think about an extra "y" on the end of Voy?Friday -I have officially quit my old job, as of yesterday, and today - strangely enough, I think, I begin looking for a better one. There are no openings at Tavern-on-the-Green yet - I went there yesterday, but let me tell you about the walk through the park you take to get there - its archetypical. You enter at 72nd St. There are two long rows of benches, where mostly old people sit and sun themselves. There is also, in this area, a playground, with little kids screaming and carrying on, while their mothers and nurses just look on, all blasª, blasª. Then, a little bit further on you come to the bandshell - a small arena with "natural" amplification, used for outdoor concerts. Anyway, hippies, and hippie clones hang out here with their guitars and frisbees. On the weekends, everybody hangs out here - for no reason. There are only a few benches, etc. but people just seem to naturally mill around. After you pass the bandshell you come to a small concrete path. There are always one or two couples dancing to Disco on rollerskates. On the weekend, again, many more. It looks quite good. After this, there are two large baseball fields. And of course, the park is always filled with music, frisbees, kites, joggers, bikers, skateboarders, muggers, lovers, etc. Everytime I walk though the park I feel innundated with adds for 7up. Healthy Healthy Healthy. Holy Holy Holy. Its too much. Sometimes I just take a book and go sit with the old people in the sun.

Dream

This is the second time in a row that I have dreamt about water. Two nights ago I dreamt about the Mediteranean Sea and a greek island named Pesta. The dream was related to Atlantis, the city that sunk into the ocean. Last night I dreamt about travelling outside of one's body. I dreamt of the Bronte children dying, but not really being dead. A small boy suddenly died, but his corpse was not buried. Within a few days it did not rot. I saw him breathing as if asleep. He opened his eyes and sat up. Said he had been on a voyage beneath the sea.Many of my friends were disappearing and I could not find them. They returned telling me that they were in another dimension, beneath the sea. Several of them said that suddenly they were able to go to a place in the depths of the ocean. They were going to have a party there and asked if I would come. I wanted to know the secret of how they were able to go to this deep place. One gave me a very tiny submarine, smaller than my smallest finger and told me to climb in. I just held it, not knowing how to use this submarine. I looked out of a window, which came to the water's edge. I wondered what would happen if I were to jump in. Would I develop fins on my neck for breathing the farther I sank? Would I find this secret buried place?

La tarea

LEE UN ARTICULO SOBRE CUALQUIER COSA

"Pensamientos sobre hipnosis"Se me ocurren muchas ideas a la vez últimamente. Me resulta cada vez más difícil concentrarme en una sóla cosa. Creo que por eso me interesó tanto leer el otro día un artículo sobre autohipnosis.La autohipnosis es un estado de conocimiento caracterizado por una alteración temporal de la conciencia. Dicho estado permite que el alma y el cuerpo respondan de una cierta manera a diversos estímulos. La autohipnosis ayuda al individuo a escuchar y obedecer sus propias órdenes y deseos. Con la autohipnosis se pueden llegar a resolver muchos problemas fácilmente, pero ello no significa que este método sea el mejor o que las decisiones tomadas bajo este estado sean más "sabias" que las tomadas sin autohipnosis. El autor del artículo declara que la autohipnosis es un método de conocimiento barato, indoloro y nada perjudicial para la salud.En estados hipnóticos el sujeto está despierto, pero su poder de concentración está dirigido hacia dentro. La autohipnosis se asemeja a ciertos estados de sueño que favorecen el conocimiento de uno mismo.

Dream

Last night I dreamt my boss Bob asked me to mop the sidewalks. I protested and said that the rain would clean them and that I could sweep them, but what was the point. He told me to do it and I knew he was just trying to prevent me from experiencing something which would have a purpose.

La tarea

"Pensamientos sobre hipnosis"

Continued

El autor* del artículo visualiza la mente humana como si fuese una pantalla de televisión. En la mitad izquierda ve el problema a tratar y en la mitad derecha un cielo azul. Luego sólo ve el cielo azul mientras van pasando una serie de imágenes frente a sus ojos. Las imágenes le hablan y el autor les contesta, intentando así resolver el problema en cuestión. Una vez acabada la sesión de hipnosis empieza la cuenta atrás. Es interesante conocer ciertas anécdotas relacionadas con la hipnosis. Por ejemplo, durante la primera y segunda guerra mundial la hipnosis se usó eficazmente para curar todo tipo de neurosis creadas por traumas de guerra. Hoy en día se utiliza la hipnosis para curar una serie de enfermedades cuyas principales causas son la ansiedad y la tensión.

* (sic.) all above references to "el autor"

Dream

Last night I had a perplexing and frightening dream. It involved committing myself to commit a crime. I was asked to participate, but no particular day or moment was mentioned. I was to be ready. From the moment I said yes I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I realized I had set a process in motion which would only gain momentum and I could not relent. The night arrived. My job was to remove the wires to an alarm system in a bank. I was trying to cut the wires from their plastic casing with a razor, but it was too dull. Voy came over to help me. Two people who we knew came into the bank and talked to us while we were completing our scheme. We knew they would be able to identify us when the police became aware of the robbery. We had to escape. We were in a foreign country, France I believe. First I suggested we drive to Morocco, but changed my mind and said we should go to Switzerland and put the money in a bank account or better still, Lichtenstein. Then as I was dreaming I asked myself what was the purpose of the dream. I asked myself whether it could refer to the idea of artist as outlaw? A person on the fringes of society?

La tarea

ESCRIBE UNA HISTORIA EN IMPERFECTO, PRÉTERITO, ETC.

CUENTO

Érase que se era una mujer que leia todos el días. Se llamaba Esperanza. Por las mañanas se ponía a leer nada más despertarse. Tenía la cama rodeada de libros de todas clases. Había libros de arte, libros que trataban la historia de los pueblos de diferentes naciones libros sobre temas políticos, de economía política, filosofía, poesía, teatro y literatura. Esperanza vivía en un mundo poblado de publicaciones. Para ella el mundo impreso era el único mundo que tenía sentido, lo único verdadero. Lo que existía fuera de los libros no era capaz de inspirarla o motivarla. Por eso mismo la vida resultaba sumamente peligrosa para Esperanza. Pero de algún modo conseguía sobrevivir. Solía ponerse a leer por las mañanas hasta que sonaba el teléfono. Si el éste sonaba, quería decir que tenía trabajo durante ese día. El cliente del momento, normalmente el director de alguna revista, le traía un manuscrito para que lo leyese y corrigiese. No hacía ni siquiera falta que saliese de casa. Cuando le entraban ganas de comer llamaba por teléfono a un restaurante y le traían la comida a domicilio. Como Esperanza vivía solamente para y por sus libros, nunca oía el ruido de la calle que entraba por la ventana. No oía los gritos de los niños. Pero nunca tenía miedo porque tenía otros mundos como armas.

I always wanted to be precocious. A Mozart, Picasso or Rimbaud. I wanted to accomplish certain feats before I was 17, before I was 18, before I was 20. But now here I am at 20. Everything done seems so minimal, tentative and not yet developed. I don't feel developed in any area. I wrote a play at 18, but it now seems an adolescent effort. It's very difficult being young and incomplete.

Dream

I have had some awful dreams recently. One which I remember involved having my eyes surgically removed. I went to NYU opthamology school. It looked exactly like their dental school and was operated in the same slapdash manner. I was seated in a chair in a cubicle. A student doctor had my chart and looked it over. He said that I was to have my optical nerve operated on. He proceeded to remove my eyes. My eyes were removed, yet I could still see. I saw my eyeballs scraped out and they became mush. I suddenly got very nervous and asked this kid if he had ever performed this operation before. He said no. I ran to the front desk covering my empty eye sockets, disgusted. I overheard the nurse telling a person who asked if the school did optical nerve operations say "no, the school did not." At that point I bellowed, "WHAT !!!" in a wrenching screech that echoed and reverberated in the corridors. It was a scream like that of Harold in the film "Harold & Maude" when he finds out Maude's taken sleeping pills and will die at midnight. The student said he was only following my chart and the nurse said maybe a hospital could help me. But I asked them what I was supposed to do with my pulverized eyeballs, which were now held by two small metal cups. They said they didn't know.

THINGS TO READ

Kurt Schwitters - Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, Stephen Foster & Rudolf Cuenzil - Gurdjieff: Making a New World - Revolution of the Word - Rothenberg - (Whitehead, Buber, Illich on education), Marsden Hartley - Androscoggin - poetry by Gopi Krishna- The Riddle of Consciousness - William Blake, Collected Poems - Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) - Mallarmª, The Poems (Bosley)

BANDS TO CHECK OUT

Slits, Bush Tetras, Dangerous Birds, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Kleenex, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

Lyn liked to dress up in a variety of kinds of clothing meant for both sexes, gender-benders. This didn't seem particularly radical to her,at least for a girl who looked like a girl, meaning one with visible breasts and hips. Once when she was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket several sizes too big she was verbally assaulted by a small group of latino men who called her "mariposa" while she mounted her bicycle. The confusion stimulated her. She found it laughable that "mariposa" was meant to be an insult since every butterfly she'd ever seen had appeared beautiful and intriguing. She mused - if you were a very tall, skinny and hairy boy wearing dresses, that would be even more daring. She did decide to shave her head though. But that was after she'd been to Mexico with Voy. On that trip her hair had been parted in the middle and held back with a scarf. She was often mistaken for Cuban or else she was "Donna Summer(s)." Once when she passed a group of boys one yelled out in english, "She work hard for the money!" "Yeah," she thought.

Scenario II.

"At home you feel like a tourist." (Gang of Four)Lyn is now living in Hoboken. Before that she lived in Mexico for eight months and before that she lived in what was known as the International East Village, before the rents went up, which is why she moved to where she now lives. She continues to follow the trail of "bohemians" and other malcontents. She considers herself to be an artist, although she has a day job, as do most of the artists she knows. She's been told that there's an artist's community in Hoboken. For some deep-seated reason the notion of a community existing appeals to her and she seeks it, although she's never before found it to exist. It becomes her El Dorado. Her undergraduate thesis was even about various people's search for artistic communities, and their subsequent disillusionment with that particular quest. Still she exists awake and dreaming.

It was weird to return. Before leaving for Mexico she'd lived on St. Mark's Place and gone regularly to hardcore concerts at CBGB's and other downtown venues. She'd worn plaid skirts and combat boots which accompanied her shaved head. She was still in the mood to rebel, but wasn't exactly sure what form her rebellion might take. The music was close to her heart, but she'd been away.

Only recently did she return to the United States. She and Voy had split up a few years before. After that she vowed she would protect herself from becoming overly emotionally attached in the future. She took an analytical look at her feelings and decided it would be an interesting experiment to observe how she might experience being in Mexico again, with some one else. In that way she hoped to put to rest the painful associations of the past with Voy. Like in a song she'd heard around then she'd "found a new rose," his name was Bruce. With Bruce she was able to have long talks about anything at all. Bruce was a writer. Where Voy had been reckless and childlike Bruce was careful and paternal. She felt a new pleasure in feeling protected. She couldn't remember having felt that way for a long time.She convinced Bruce that it would be a good idea to live in Mexico for as long as their saved money could last. With rents going up in the E.V. it seemed like a good time to be gone. There they hoped to do research on sculptures they'd seen at an exhibition in New York. Not much information seemed to be available about these sculptures of copulating figures which were elements in religious tableaux, like the last supper. The one thing that was known was that these sculptures were from Ocumicho and they were only made by women. The figures were a combination of devils, maidens and mermaids and were being called devil sculptures. All of that supplied a grant objective. Once there the idea was that they could both follow their individual artistic pursuits. Lyn wanted to draw and collect material for new work and Bruce wanted to write fiction and poetry. Bruce managed to win a prestigious grant for journalism about the hardcore music scene in New York. So for a second time Lyn left for Mexico and for a second time she had to come back.

"It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five)"I don't wanna holiday in the sun" (Sex Pistols)"Rock, rock, Rockaway Beach" (Ramones)

Return to ___________

I'm sitting at the worktable in my studio in Oaxaca, Mexico feeling nervous about beginning. Beginning to work or write.MEXICO JOURNAL AND NOTEBOOK ENTRIES (tk) - IT BREAKS OFF IN MID-SENTENCEOR ENDS WITH SONG LYRICS: "We belong to the ________ generation." (Richard Hell and the Voidoids)

ROAD QUOTES

"The boy asked him where he was going and he told him to another city. The boy asked him if he was going that far in this car here and he said yes he was. He tapped the boy on the front of his shirt. He said nobody with a good car needed to worry about anything, and he asked the boy if he understood that. The boy said yes he did, that that was his opinion too. "(Wise Blood, Flannery O' Connor)

"All Shepard characters - rock star, billionaire, or ordinary mortal - are tourists caught in a world that has undergone a cultural landslide, looking through the debris to find images of themselves. What they can't find, they adapt from the storehouse of images that films, TV, rock, science fiction, etc., provide. If what they find doesn't suit them, they unsentimentally steal."("Men Without Women: The Shepard Landscape," Florence Falk, in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard,, ed. Bonnie Marranca)

"Even though it originated in 1830s Paris, the whole notion of a bohemia seems so American (Dream) to me, so much about "lightin' out" for the frontier. Bohemia still plays a role in bourgeois fantasy as the road not taken, where you could've would've done your own thing, free from the yoke of work and family. This quest for breathing space was always less about art than about capitalism, an escape from the rat race and the cultural cookie cutter. In this fluid zone, someone from the lower class could slip in and someone from the upper class could opt out. Certainly, a revolt against capitalism is something few people - and few artists - are interested in these days.""The Beats were the first bohemian movement born under the eye of mass media."(On Edge, C. Carr)

"It was poets like Mr. Ginsberg (now $96,228-a-year tenured professor at Brooklyn College) addressing his nation with pre-inflationary words like "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing./America two dollars and 27 cents January 17, 1956" who paved the way for an entire generation's anti-materialism and resurgence of spiritual values." (Michael Blumenthal, "Allan Ginsberg, Millionaire?" The New York Times, October 29, 1994)

(TEXT BELOW BECOMES THE VOICE OVER FOR THE MADRID VIDEO - Leave in directing instructions )Why Mexico? She tried to think back. A rapid rush of associations and images flooded her vision: (tk) flashback -Her uncle in uniform, young, her mother's brother, back from Mexico, he says a family wanted to adopt him there, later he used to read in spanish in Cleveland aloud to workers at the American Greeting Card Company, he was the first artist she'd ever met, she'd met him before she'd known it, he was a beatnik's age, she didn't know that until later when she found his Esquire jazz greats photo magazines, his Kent State yearbook, photos with the other hip cats, and a turquoise ring with a missing stone which she believed to be from Mexico and which she still wears. The flood continued, times and places all jumbled : Freddie Prince (suicide), Geraldo Rivera (sell out), West Side Story, spanish, a usable language in the U.S., Timoteo (peace corps hippy), Ms. Fajardo (Cuban debutante via Miami), spanish eyes, looking spanish (are you from the island? P.R., Ajua Camos/The Latin House, salsa in CT. and in Mexico, D.F., Ntoztke Shange, near rape, my spanish teacher's rape, Argentinians in exile, my exiled Argentinian journalist-political economic/Latin American studies professor, my foreign exchange student form formerly Allendes's Chile, me getting lost.She asked herself: Do I want to unpack this dense baggage? Is it too soon still? Maybe I want to be lost a little longer.

A second trip to Mexico. A compulsion to return to the scene of the crime. (Tk)

Scenario III.

Ten Year Later. Venezuela (to be continued)

Scenario IV.

Traveling Solo. Spain: Visit I. Spain: Visit II. Research. Art. Life. (to be continued)

VIDEO SYNOPSIS