the golden west volume 12 part 5 - 1998 january

work & days: a lifetime journal project

11 I wake these mornings still thinking about that paper. I come out with a summary sentence. I haven't held on to them but I take it I'm working. What I'm working on is theory of perception, imagining, representation. Why I'm working on them is political. Perception is being described as if it's necessarily out of touch - rationalist theory of perception. I'm thinking of those moments of distress at the Slade looking at pronouncements about perception. How can they say this. Thinking of my land. What do I know about perception. The world gets more beautiful as I get older, as if more detail is felt. Langer wanted to call all sorts of cognition feeling. That was in 1942. Gibson wants to call it resonance. There's more to know about that. Theory is ways of talking, which are set up and exit-organized by ways of imagining, so I will make theory that gives pictures. I want to ask what people are imagining when they talk about perceiving. I want to be writing from the beginning and finding pictures as I write - and looking for neuroscience images - and getting permission and copies. I want to go to a neuroscience conference and get images. I have a lot to do. I don't want to be a tenured professor though I want the money. I want to be an artist in residence at the Neurosciences Institute, something like that, informally if I have to. Artists' grant in a couple of years when I have a video. For Sandra's seminar, Land, relationship and community. Land - that word - the land - touches off my strongest love and trust. I look on the land, that land, the miles in a circle around our yard. What I can see from the yard, its hills. Sitting in church and seeing the dust rise on the road, the lit-up dust, its curls and curves, slow expanding rise. Looking out from among the cooped-up community being preached at by unentitled people, people who had not won my trust by seeing me, those people trying to install their ways in me, and now in universities - universitas the whole, entire number, the one church - where unentitled people still preach. The lawful motion of the lifting of the dust, the universal motion, saying the I am of it is. Sandra yesterday - oratory - very polite, thanking and acknowledging because it is the thing to do. The word mother didn't cross her lips. "My father, Martin Semchuk," was an MLA, she needed to tell us. It was pious oratory, and it was pious the better to insinuate a number of points in self promotion, her show in where-was-it, the fact that her 'partner' is band manager, her graduate work in New Mexico, her father's position. And then there was her red Indian guy with his brutal face and naughty ways. She invited him to read his bad poems because he would throw a jealous fit if she did not - is my guess. What I was mainly feeling was a question, what is it to define oneself in the family? What am I that's different than that? I define myself in the universe not in the family. For me the family is that sitting in church, with Judy's rivalry, my father's tension and malice, Paul's humiliation, Rudy's crumbling, my mother's hunger - and in church the men and boys' separateness, the girls' rivalry and small-spiritedness, the aunts and uncles gone away into prosperity of whatever kind they can reach. Opa impotently trying to impose the old ways. Oma - I respect her laughter. Opa Epp - I respect his interestedness. Sandra saying she found ways to stay open. That. That's the unarguable core. When I look at my summary of my family I see the pleasure I take in writing them off. I tried to stay open with them, I didn't succeed. Am I wrong to write them off     Will you tell me what's wrong about it     you are responsible to search to recover success My feeling of success     no, actual cultural success I could describe all of them differently     it isn't about describing them differently If I write them off, do I write myself off     Necessarily     Will you tell me what it is about     end of illusion Their illusion     no, yours Ending child's illusion of strength and truth     YES   That cutting off is the child's illusion of strength and truth     YES Pain at the heart is the alternative     Each of those descriptions is the central pain     YES Their central pain     NO A pain I assign to them     YES Wow     there you are My rivalry, my tension and malice, my humiliation, my crumbling, my hunger, my separatedness, my small-spiritedness, my gone-awayness into prosperity, my impotent effort to impose the old ways, my laughter, my interestedness - when i was a child I was all of those? Not all. I am isolated from those people because I want them to carry those things     YES What I could do is relate to myself in them in those ways     Will you lead me     something about giving Take them as gifts     YES See them as something they have given me     YES Is it true     YES They installed all those things in me     YES Do you mean I feel it as if they do     YES This is very painful     yes Is it true that I am those things because they are     no I am those things because that's what human beings are     no Dear larger one I am willing to be in truth about all those things     YES When I get to pressure at the head am I at basic basic     YES But I didn't get through I went back to sore heart     YES Will you lead me     creation Sentence?     excluded child, leaving, finish, reversal I'm shaky and lost     I lost it     14 Hey - that was a visit. On Monday I drove down and fetched you. Titanic at the Granville 6. Japanese dinner. It's snowing on the street, you're happy. We come home and try to fit into the green chair. Eat grapes and go to bed. Tuesday I wake you and say, Can you be out the door in half an hour? We stand half an hour waiting for a 135. Cars pass with snow hats. A small 4x4 sprays slush. We meet Laiwan on the bus. Tom walks around the quad while I'm in the lecture. He sees my office. We wait for another bus. Long ride on the Metrotown, wiping mist off the window, Tom standing in the packed aisle. He found me a seat and defended it. Through the misted patch, streets I've never seen, hedges, alder woods, ravines, manor houses set behind brick walls. We ride the skytrain east as far as it goes, over the river. Coming back Tom wants the front window. We're squashed together on one seat seeing the city at the far far end of the track. Tom's riffing on delighted worms with blue eyes - greeter worms - trackside lights - Hi! Hi! they say. Then there's the fine fact that we can step off the train and onto the seabus. The water is grey, the land is white, the sky a backlit ivory over the waterfront. There are patches of black ducks elastic on the waves. We take the seabus back. I bring Tom across the street to see the Publab. I call up Photoshop. He plays. We take a bus home. Meet Terry at the corner. "You're in the same line of work," I say. Make supper and go pick up Rob for the garden meeting. Pem at the meeting is a big old Dutch baby. Rob defends his design with more gumption than I've ever seen him show. Pem looks at me with blear petulant eyes and says in his heavy accent "And Ellie, what are you going to do to ...." "She brought me for that," Rob says. I come home and find the kitchen clean, dishes put away, chairs tucked up to the table. We go to bed. He squirms mightily, there's a way to get my bum against his thighs. His squirms press me always nearer the edge of the bed. This morning. How did we get to the good state. We poked. But first we failed to poke, and that gave me time to get there. Hungry nibbles. We listed all the stuff in an office worker's house. I read him the pages since Christmas. He had his young face. Forgot to say last night in the dark we had our faces pressed together, wet, while I was telling him about the last night in Leucadia. I don't have energy tonight, can't write here in the evening. You fell asleep on the bus going home. 15th Five o'clock Friday morning. Yesterday aching and dragging. Teaching those monstrosities, Aquinas's arguments for the existence of god and the necessary/contingent distinction. I'm thinking I have to do something about energy. I'm barely alive. With the last paper I didn't have the energy to organize it or see it through. That was a strange sensation, to be writing haphazardly. It's mid-January. Wet, moldy, dirty, skyless, enclosed, cold - evil dirty exhausted winter. I'm thinking of you, Spark, with affection. I liked being on the road with you all day, I loved lying in bed with you the morning you left, I loved your company, the you of you. I can feel it now, that very particular squeeze of the heart that is your young spirit. There was the night I came home from the garden meeting. You'd been reading my journals. We were lying together and you were suddenly angry. I was lying in the dark beside you stricken at the heart, just holding on, shutting down the way I do - freezing - going hopeless. But when you asked how I was doing I found it to say so, "I'm stunned, I don't know where that came from suddenly." You said, "Male anger is hard, it's hard for me too." And then it was all better. That was a satisfying moment. You decided to come without tapes. We went out together and didn't watch TV. When I asked what had been your favorite moment you said getting sprayed with slush. 18th What do I think about Love, again. Doris Lessing is nearly eighty, writing about a sixty-five year old as if she were a forty-five year old, describing something like what I've been going through for the last five years. Does nature kill people of grief because they might otherwise live too long, she wonders. Why does infancy recur? She has been tracking infancy in herself for thirty (?) years. "Your love woman," she has Stephen say. I wasn't interested in Julie Vairon, though it was obviously the fantasy that works for her - herself loved but unmarried, living in a forest. What's my relation to / her relation to the troubadour landscape? Being afraid of music: I know that one. Julie's music. Julie is love woman, anima for men and women, made unintelligent for the masses. The vagabond, Sophia in rags in the lower world - Gnostic? Is that the answer to connection with troubadour landscape? Music as emanation. She is older when it leaves her, but it is excruciating and can kill. So many kinds of men - the Frenchman, the rich American, the cowboy actor, the beautiful gayboy, the electric director who is the real one, the ugly baby brother, the aristocratic vulnerable friend. They all come to sit by her, though she is old. What I miss in it is the bookwork. This time she's making people who don't use what happens to them to study. A midsummer night's dream. Julie is mulatto because half-shadow, civilized shadow, shadow educated to draw, sing, compose, write. For people who aren't artists, is it better to seal the door to infant agony? For people who are artists, is opening it the only way? In Valhalla the farmhouse with the sealed door upstairs. I sat in that room, next to the warm chimney, and wrote nothing but chaos. Julie's music. It's singing. Her first phase, "running and splashing water, the noise of cicadas and crickets, owls and nightjars, and the high thin scream of a hawk on its rocky heights, and the winds of that region, which whine dryly through hills where troubadours went, making their singular music." Second phase, "long flowing rhythms go on and very occasionally a primitive theme appears, as if by that is meant sounds that remind one of dancing, of physical movement. But then it becomes only one of several themes weaving in and out, rather as the voices in late Medieval music make patterns where no one voice is more important than another, impersonal." Not to forget Lessing has made an entertainment with three attractive settings - London literate society, English country house, and lavender-piney south of France - and many attractive types - aristocrats, successful actors and other artists, and sympathetic rich people. "A love woman. A woman who takes her stand on love." "There are men who carry with them, as some half-grown fishes are attached to yolk-sacs, the shadow of their mothers, at once visible in an over-defensiveness and readiness for suspicion." "Shimmering uncomfortable patterns of sound continually repeating, but not exactly, for they changed by a note, or a tone, so that when you thought you were listening to the same sequence of notes, they had subtly changed, gone into a different mode, while the ear followed a little behind. The words were half heard, were cries, or even laments, but from another time, the future perhaps, or another place, for if these sounds mourned, it was not for any small personal cause." Do you want to say anything about that     it's about your excluded child, heartbreak and strength in reserve I knew that     no Will you tell me how not     you think you're liberated and improved but it's unconscious tyranny Sarah's love woman killed herself     Lessing's?     no Mine?       Can love woman survive middle and old age     Women die out of femininity when it starts to be humiliating     YES Married women cutting their hair     Is that a picture of love woman in old age     YES Aren't I hanging onto Tom so love woman can live     no Then why?     to win over her By making her safe     YES I'm not seeing that the book is about my defeat     YES Do you want me to be only and always in pain     no Does Doris Lessing devour me     YES Do I feed her energy     no I do it because I want to be more important     YES   Is Tom okay     I'm worried that I'm taming him     Am I taming him     Is that what I'm supposed to do     Will I still love him if he's tamer     YES Will you explain to me what would be the better outcome     complete delayed child's liberation I am willing     YES 19 Here's something. On the phone these days he is playing and he's lightly bright, and I find myself wanting to run. It feels like being afraid it's going to end. I cautiously play back. He's asking questions, he's responding to things I say, he's listening. I get dumbfounded when it happens. Something that I can trust about you, that I like a lot, is your appetite for what happens, all the quirks and swerves. I'm frightened by this access of joy. Is it possible he isn't going to leave, is it possible I'm not going to leave, is it possible he's going to keep opening up, is it possible there's nothing wrong. On Saturday as I was falling asleep I woke frightened remembering saying to Muggs, "I feel like I'm just going around telling people not to do things." What frightened me was my tone of confidence, the confidence with which I bear myself every day. Was that a fluke     Is there someone in me who is frightened all the time     no Is that confidence a bluff     no it is the confidence native to you Okay. - Land, relationship and community. Land and community, what relation. Nothing simple, although I want to feel it as simple. When I was a child community was bad, land was good. I felt loved by the land. Land has such a shine of love. Community, of uneasiness, rivalry, failure, oppression, bullying, exclusion, betrayal. But there have been other communities - my first consciousness-raising group, the community garden, sometimes the community I can make of a tutorial group - where we are love: the question whether I love or whether I am loved doesn't come up. I want community to mean love, but it means other things at other times. Functional organization. People who make roads. People who make soup. People suffering, defeated, desperate, people without function. There was land, we were in the midst of it, in the most direct contact, and yet there was constant effort to base community on something other than that land. We worked. Why was it labor that drove them out of paradise? Labor is necessary to paradise. 20th noospheric entrainment impregnatory impulse a kiss before zygote enfolded in glistening explosion electronically dispatched self like a body surfer And all that is à propos dear friend. I printed your first email and then got on the web. If you want to find someone, try persons it said. Boxes for first name, last name, city, state. Mafalda - Reis - CA I said. None on email but try the phone it said. Okay. Ten addresses and phone numbers in ten cities. New search: Joseph - Fendler - CA. Immediately an address and phone number for Joseph Fendler in Ontario, California. I switch to email. Joseph Victor and Joseph V, both with Army addresses. I click on the first one. High schools and colleges listed. I click on the second one. Same colleges. Then I gasp. I don't think I've ever gasped before. Looking for Thomas Fendler, it says. Talk about glistening explosion of meaning, tumbling into contact. Oh my dear. We have another child, if you are willing. Painful joy of the kind there is when something is true. There is something else. It is January 20 and I'm not only not lost, I'm finding. I phone and this is what I say: "I found Joey and he's looking for you." You're going back to your bed. "I guess he's found me," you say. "Thank you for loving me so much to be so curious." You laugh. You're thanking god. Your laugh is beautiful. "That saved a wretch like me" you say. You are a sweetheart of a wretch, I say. But what was that next moment - you're in the phone booth and snarl at the drunk who tries to panhandle you. 22nd "Clever, whimsical, engaging, deep, polished, important and daring." I love being praised by a writer. Janet at Harbour Centre yesterday. Doing what I do, differently. Managing the egos of five committee members, she said, and Garnet at home. "Do you each have a space?" "He has the whole house." "And you have what's left." He's bitter that he hasn't had scholarship money, she says. "Maybe the unthinkable is true and you are better than him?" "Oh I am better than him," she says in her voice with its trace, just a trace, of Manchester. I am studying her across the table in the food mall. She's less substantial than she was, another face completely, small mouth in pink lipstick, a smile hitched up on the left to show pointed little teeth. Skin poreless as the skin on warm milk, as thin as that, showing its thinness where it pulls into wrinkles. She's fifty. I stare to see what fifty looks like. She's nine years off booze. Read a paper last summer at a good conference. Staunch academic and adventurer. It's going to be destabilizing, she says of Tom. Encourage him to go up, or down, in small stages. And yes, when I called you last night, guilt and misgiving had swarmed where joy opened the hatch. Why didn't you find him sooner, you're asking. Good question but no use to answer it in a blaming way. "I am going to have to stand in the fire of scrutiny observed candidly as the man I am. Growth I must accomplish, and quickly in some areas. My story will become his story. Suit up and show up and walk through this chapter with morally correct and effective steps." My warrior - I so much like the way you are saying this. A year ago you wouldn't have looked it in the eye. 23 I'm deeply interested in you, always have been. - At my tutorial today I found myself telling the students this story: once when I was hitchhiking I got a ride with a very old man in an old truck, and he said to me, God wouldn't burn his children. At the end of the session we went around the room, so all of them could have that moment to be seen. A boy with wild eyes, a girl with a pointed chin above a long ivory neck. I go fearlessly into these tutorials. Here's what we're doing today. And then somewhere in the tutorial that moment of personal thawing - I'm in charge but you can see my simplicity, here it is. Storytelling. Telling them Paley's argument as a story. I could see the story had them. When I met Terry at the counter of the Portuguese store yesterday he told me about watching Rowen introducing his cousin to Dungeons and Dragons. The kid amazed, I was really there, I thought we were playing half an hour, it was four hours. As I was walking from West Mall to my tutorial through the concrete corridor I met a bagpiper whose music, broken into echo parts as it was by the hard four walls, was fibrous and wonderful. But he was followed by an absurd procession in single file, a short man holding high a stuffed gut on a silver platter, a tall man in a kilt carrying a sword with point upright, a thin woman in a longish black skirt and plaid shawl, a chunky young woman in schoolgirl's plaid skirt. A collection of Richard Ford stories. Men whose wives or whose mothers work in bars. Mothers and fathers and young men who just unlatch from each other. Boxers, hunters, fishers. A drunk man in a wheelchair who catches a drowned deer. They're about the unbearable transience of belonging - dear you - but you'll never read them. Richard Ford 1988 Rock Springs Vintage 24 Saturday morning. Dark, wet, dull. Ahead are two days of marking papers. Aches and cold. The city hideously dirty, miscellaneous. All my money spent before I get it, so I don't have any to play with. Winter fat so I don't like the way I look. My clothes worn out and too tight. If I do hard physical work, which I'd like, I'll ache for days. This room has all these ugly papers waiting. I can't think of a thing I want, except to be living in a clean room in California - with new clothes - a clean fixed-up car - a city I don't know - green waves - a book published and praised - good health and energy - access to smart people - lots of money - the other kind of writing, beautiful writing - pictures - plants - a bed, a chair, a table - hardly any papers. I'd like to give away almost everything I own. I want out. I'm far too installed, I'm wedged in. 25th Bellingham, Shangri-la Motel "Redemption of the father invariably seems to require facing monstrous rage and aggression, both one's own and that which the father himself was unable to integrate." [book about absent fathers, lost sons] Nights below Station Street. I was zonking and now I'm not, but now I'm here with a sore heart and having hot flashes sitting waiting for eleven o'clock when he comes off shift. The Arctic song of the fridge, a blizzard wind. Power lines. Rain in the spot of orange light under the street lamp hood. I'm not right, today, I'm not in the true place, or I wouldn't be empty this way. I am not complaining of you but I'm wondering if I've just folded. There's no life in me toward you. Driving down this morning I was almost blank. I'm soul-less, hope-less, dull, I have nothing to say. Wanting Joyce. That means it's pain of some kind, maybe a kind I don't know. Confinement, loneliness. 26 How extraordinary. As we sat on the bed at 11:30 last night, Tom caving in Super Bowl gossip, a knock on the door. There stands a young black man. Tom throws a punch with his left hand. They're shuffling at the door. Tom says, Phone the police. I go to the door to see whether I can stop the fight. I try to close the door between them. Both of them hold it open. I go knock on the caretaker's window. I see a man in the bed behind her. She'll call the police. I go back along the walkway. There is Tom face down on the bed with the black guy pinning him. I back off. Tom won't want me to see this. Next thing the black guy is leaving. Everything's cool, he says to me. It's as if they have shaken hands and agreed it's over, whatever it was. The cops are on the way, I say. Now it's as if I'm giving him a friendly warning. What happened? I say to him. It was a misunderstanding, he says. Tom is telling me not to talk to the man but I persist. Why did you knock on the window? I thought it was somebody else in the room, I borrowed an iron. The phone rings. The caretaker says, Is it over? The police will want to talk to us anyway. I go bring her the bloody bedspread so she can soak it. Tom's nose is still bleeding. There's a bite on his back. When I return from the office there's a policeman, very large. Then two more. Tom has his shirt off, there's a cop with a flash camera taking pictures of the bite on his back. Tom looks exhausted. He looks seventy years old, he looks like his mother. Tuesday 27th Coffee shop in Blaine. CN cars pulling north alongside of the bay as they pass reveal one drop shaking among alder tassels, two men in orange hard hats, the rock zigzag of the breakwater. It rained all night. We got up in the dark, you're at the widget factory, I'm halfway home. There is (there was, it's ten minutes and a cheese omelet later) concentrated syrup-colored sunlight on the branchy trees, twiggy bushes, spangled blackberries. White city of White Rock across the bay. A half hour last night in our room in the Evergreen Motel that shifted into perfection, not from sex but from looking at Double Take together. We came out of looking at photographs and could see where we were. The two lamps, the big room with slightly sloped ceiling, the claret-colored curtains that looked as if they had shrunk in the wash, old venetians the color of ivory at both windows, lampshades too. The openness of the floor with its few pieces of old furniture, the gentle gold of the light, the room's warmth, warm enough to have the window up, the sound of a stream, fresh air, knowledge of trees nearby in the dark, one willow leaf caught in the screen, carpet like an old blanket over a floor with loose boards. A sense of travel, the room so oddly anachronistically un-Americanly itself, and yet no other time or place exactly suggested - an atemporal coherence. There we lay, having survived a shadow visit of stunning unexpectedness and dreamlike aptness, Super Bowl Sunday's celebration of male mayhem constellating Tom's lifetime vulnerability to possession by - guess who - Mars. (While at the same time the whole country was celebrating their president-boy's possession by - guess who - Venus. And as if both of them - Bill and Hillary - are self-possessed in a passage of more important but greater mystery than national business. I assume he's lying. I assume she understands her position. I assume he will be indicted. I assume they'll be okay and everyone will be satisfied in a way no one will be able to name. It is celebratory, some sort of propitiatory drama, like Diana's death. Love woman died. Love woman is being subpoenaed. Love woman will bring down the boss.) Presumably Tom's scuffle with Michael Green the black man was a mutual contract and something to do with evading mothers, which is why, when Tom reported that Michael had said to him, "I respect you as a man" and I laughed, the policeman with a camera looked at me out of the corner of his eye indicating a smile with a very small lifting of the corner of his mouth. And here's how it started: Sunday half an hour before the knock I said how desperately bored I've been, Tom said he'd raise some hell for me, I said there isn't a speck of hell to be found within a thousand miles of here. - When I get home: 1. there is email from Joey dated Monday 11:55 AM; 2. there is a letter from UBC saying I am not short-listed. 28th Joyce this morning. I make her laugh by asking if she can teach me to schmooze, schmoozing is my spiritual path. And then I tell her about finding Joey and the uneasiness I feel. It would be better if Tom had done it, I say. Yes she says. Was your father a prodigal father? He absolutely was, and he still is, but what I'm feeling at this moment is rage that my mother didn't make him, doesn't make him, find me. That's not her job, says Joyce. Yes it is so her job, I say. She can't do it, says Joyce. If she weren't so passive, if she worked as hard as I do, if she learned and studied the way I do, she would be able to, I say. I'm interested in the conviction I feel. I feel like stamping my foot. Yes she could so make him do it. It's not for her to do, Joyce says again. Yes it is, if he's helpless, then she should teach him. Joyce says she's moved by the courage she is seeing. You mean because it's young, I say. Yes. It's a terrible burden, Joyce says. It's better than sitting in bed year after year alone. And it's not such a burden. It's an interesting task. But yes there has been (a long silence where she lets me find it) an unending background of obsession. I'm trying to construct somebody who will love me. Tom does love me, but I've been trying to make him reliable. When I tell Louie the story she says she is seeing a little girl she has never seen - not the withdrawn child, a firey child, a confident child. And then when I've taken Louie home I go look at my email, and Joey, Joe, has written a letter for me to read to Tom, which I have done. An indignant letter, a good letter. What I should be noticing I guess is the energy that I have put into making myself a woman who can make a man do something he should do. There is a way I am saying, if you won't find Joey I bloody well will, because he is waiting for you. As if Joey is a member of my club of abandoned children and I'm not even sure I haven't been with Tom specifically on his behalf. And if I have spent two years as Joey's advocate it was well spent. That's what I have to say. And as for Tom (I am saying to Joey) even if he did not look for you, he did find someone who could, and he went to a lot of trouble to hang on to me. "I will say that in my experience it is perfectly possible and even inescapable to love and hate what you have never had." 29th The feel of the moment in the Evergreen Motel, when I say, I love traveling with you. Do you know why? Because when I'm with you I never wish I were somewhere else. What about it. It was a moment like deep velvet - like three years old - so safe. Later falling asleep in our wide bed holding hands. I just love you (phone rings), Mr Love Man. 31st January Saturday night. Luke phoned last night. He was spiraling down, he said, in a dry way, not like last summer. Thoughts he was surprised to have. He thought, who can I speak to? Not Roy, because Roy thinks well of him. I say I want to say to the young person in him that my good opinion of him, the kind of good opinion of him that I have, is not less from anything he can tell me. He's crying. I'm going carefully, I know he's in real danger. I can't help. I can say I know that degree of pain. I can name his state. I can tell him there is a way through. I can't take him to the moment where he commits himself to learn. Should I tell him that it's the defended state that wants to die     YES The voice is correct but not literal     YES Did you help me with him last night     Do you want to say more about Luke     about alcohol. He is coming through withdrawal, passage from difficulties of abandonment. He's doing the work in his own way     YES Are you saying he's going to be okay     YES Was he grieving because his child died     YES Does he like it that I love an alcoholic     Does he like it that I found Joey     Thank you for teaching me so I can be better for Luke     Was Joyce wrong saying it wasn't my mother's job     YES volume 13 the golden west volume 12: 1997-98 september-january work & days: a lifetime journal project