I remember:
As I drummed, a robe of white feathers was given to me. It gathered me up in itself, from head to foot. It was both weighty and light.
I’m becoming the apple which floats; hovers kestrel-like in the space between us. You sit. I float above your face with my desire.
The eye, the mandorla between my legs sees you as you fidget. I say, ‘swollen, shining, full’ and you are aroused. There’s sex magic here. I’m the fruit you hold between your teeth (they’re shining as you laugh). You bite me gently.
The open force field my chest your chest
The tops of my thighs
With your testicles clustered as winged seeds I’m sitting on them in the drawings: somewhat small, girlish, absorbed.
(I read old notes:The need to be born as a black sheep when it’s time to make a big leap with soul learning.)
I’m lost when I try to shut down Eros, to control it. I cant control it.
There’s pain when you’re surrounded by desire, and the sense of Eros is rooted in someone else. I ask how can it not be rooted in someone else? By not being their exclusive property you say. I think, so it’s an eros which floats, can inhabit anyone? What happens when I try to stop the face of Eros arriving in my paintings? It feels like chaos… but with time I see something else, something new:
The picture is a parent picture. Its a garden, overgrown and wild. There are new plants growing. There’s a sky opening. It’s a creature, it has open lips. It might be my two legs blue as night, the spirit line bisecting them. The rein from the horse’s lips is blue too, you caress it in your open palm.
The face of Eros is not you (you said). I need to let it be the face of Eros and not worry if it looks like you (I ask). Am I painting the fleshy embodiment of Psyche? Eros needs the spirituality of Psyche…what about the fleshy part, what happens to that? Is it burned away? Is it what I carry in my un-kissed face? I ask you questions, you don’t answer.
I paint a mare who’s waited long. She carries me in her arms. Her udder swells and sends a jet of milk, a stiff tail feather, it roots this Bird-Child in milkiness. It’s milk made erect; it’s flying milk, milk made stiff; a tail-feather tension. Sweet milk as semen-wand; I ask her.
And the stiff milk is masculine (it’s you); you’re filling the milk cells, giving them direction, taking the rounded softly curving forms of the udders and making them arrow-like, a tail-feather flight path into the body of the child.
In the new painting the magician touches my chin with his out-stretched pale fingers. As his hands come towards me they become pale as light. The way his hand just touches my chin, it looks as if he is about to gently turn my face away from the world, and towards him. I would like to do this, to turn away from the world, and towards him. I love him and I want to turn towards him.
His other hand gently guides my lower body, he keeps me from swinging too much. The gold enters my crown when he is beside me. I am inspired when he is beside me. He’s always been beside me. I had to wait to know him. I always knew I’d find him. I wasn’t impatient. The Angel Out Ahead let me know.
He is made of gold, a deeper red-gold like the colour of my horse when she was young, touched by the sun. I’m paler gold, and deepest blue, and white. My eyes are pale blue, the colour of spirit. I remember telling you about that blue.
There is a dream-vessel gathering sky fluid which came to me in a dream. A dream of you and me, and fish, and love. I know the sky can open, it’s a pattern full of spirit lines, like the body I am when I open for spirit, when I open for you.
I’m fluid, and that’s ok. I’ve been traumatised, my body has reflected this. I can let go to an extent, and expect nothing of myself. I feel dizzy, swimmy, writing this.
What I feel for you is desire distilled:layer upon layer of petal, of skin, of kiss, of breath; of the magical stone I found in my garden. There was a musical retort when my trowel struck it, and my inquisitive fingers find you, the part you left for me to find there. Rounded, perfect for my hand, smaller than you are when aroused, but nevertheless a talisman, a reminder of you. I brought it with me yesterday but I didn’t show you. Perhaps I needed to write about it first. Or perhaps its about the male member, the loving male member, about to come into my life. My trowel found it. My hand, my arm. Seeking to make a hole in the earth to plant something. Musical sound as I strike stone with metal. I draw out the stone phallus from the earth. I wipe off the damp soil, I study it, I take it indoors, I keep it with me, in my bag. I should make it a bag of its own, to keep it precious.
Every passing touch, every time I’ve thought of you, and you aren’t here: all goes into my distilled desire. My paintings are distilled desire, desire distilled. You are with me in my studio as I paint, as I dance, as I eat chocolate. When you tend your bees I move about the grasses on the path. I helped a man once, in southern France, we moved his hives from a mountain side to the valley. The air was clean. It was night. I was young, it was all mysterious.
From a Moleskine Fassbinder notebook, a few notes ++++++++++ 2019
From the Annunciation, Marla
A man born from a flower in space a man
Riding a colt foaled from a sterile mare…
…………………..
Purcell Funeral Sentences Herreweghe
Eating flowers for healing
Wearing flowers of animal skin for healing.
Horse milk/flower milk for redemption. Drinking it.
Becoming pregnant with flowers/birds/fire
The buzzard-plaited wound
I pull birds from my mouth
A dream of writing about how a mountain is made (he is a man, he is masculine, strong) : of a morning’s birdsong and butterfly wings. A damsel fly hatching in the garden. Flying in circles. Standing with my son among the leaves and the sunshine, watching the creature fill her wings and fly heavenwards, a green and dusky joy (the quality of the black that absorbs all light yet is not dark).
I’m a tree with palpitations, with a swollen tongue, reaching out to save herself from falling; who loves her son; who was beaten;
She carries eggs, searches for meaning in her leaves and dead sticks. She’s sad, with a swollen tongue, growing a horn. She learns to stretch her love, to make it flow like a river.
A dream of a room with three fireplaces and three mothers. Soul bundles hanging from a tree.
The memories of creatures who dream of this place; who visit at night. The badger by the front door. I hang the bones you gave me from the tree, from my body they hang, hard as sun-dried sea plants. I’m a tree with a song.
You run to greet me. You take me, you gather me up.
I write about the child with her own milk, she came in the painting. She makes her own wings with the milk. Where does it come from? Could it be a shower of heavenly fluid spurting from the phallus, the man-creature standing near? It’s also, at the same time, mare’s milk. She absorbed it through the tips of her growing hair. The milk soaks into her scalp; bathing her brain it seeps through her cells into her breasts making wings of whiteness for her heart. Horse milk, man-milk for redemption. Drinking it. Holiness.
And there’s a horse with a golden hoof. Perpetually waiting to be born, the soft-tipped golden hoof doesn’t pierce the wall of the horse’s womb.
A friend across the seas gives me a golden spine. It grows out beneath my tail, and sinks into the earth, holding me fast.
Labia – wings from behind the sexual area. A Minotaur head/tops of the body minus head. Is it a wing or a rock behind her? Both? The conversation between a wing and a rock.