the golden west volume 16 part 5 - 1999 march-april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

15 March What I dreamed - among many other things - that I came into a little piece of ground where I was going to talk about what I knew - it was marked out into a rectangular floor with a border of cut blocks of stone. I said it was the temple of the ruined child, I mean I didn't know what I was going to call it until I said it. The abandoned child, the - what was the third term? It was like bereft but not. - the betrayed child. I was talking to a crowd of people like people I've spoken to in the herb garden. A woman with short dark hair, quite a tall athletic woman, walked to the top of the rectangle and put a gift into the earth where the head of the space, or altar, would be. I understood that she knew already what the space was about. Every sentence of my talk came to me as I spoke and informed me too. I said the process of working with the ruined child goes like this. The child doesn't know it is ruined. It says, I'm fine. But there is always an edge in its relations with other people. Something isn't right. The way the work starts is when someone else picks a moment, usually one that comes up by means of a dream, and helps you find your true feeling in relation to that moment. That can go on for years. The second phase is when you begin to work by yourself to do that. As I spoke this sentence I saw Joyce was standing beside me. I had woken in the night with a burning bar across the solar. Tried different things. What dissolved it was when I said, as the child, when are you coming for me - please come for me - When I read the sentence that says I saw Joyce was standing beside me, my eyes fill. Is the tall athletic woman you    no A version of me     A gift to the head     I don't see her very well    YES Is she the one who sang with me     The one who knows already     She puts her gift in the space     The place where I tell the story     Do you want to say more about her     intimacy, beginning, come through, childhood exclusion The one who was built to come through     YES Joyce built her     NO I did, with her     By choosing to trust     She was the one who looked after me when I chose to crash (tears)     YES Joyce understood how to make her     no How to call her     16 Yesterday I shopped for clothes - a stunning fitted jacket - stunning fit - the most femme jacket in the world - and three good pairs of pants and yellow tube socks. - Today again the spot at the heart-center of the chest is burning. Like a thumb pressing down hard. The book seems to be contradicting itself about Tom. I don't know where to start writing. Feel no interest in any of those topics. Am not fresh with any of the piles. Don't have a live hope for the result, except the doc and being finished. It all feels old. I haven't found the - I don't know what - angle in, which would have conviction or energy. I'm frightened. I was brave in the work but now I have to defend that bravery, show it, set it so it can be seen, do it the honor of setting its results so they are not hidden in the thesis binding but shining on tables in bookstores. I am willing to do that. I am willing to shine with originality and truth and heart and discernment. I am also willing to be shown where I am wrong or incomplete, for the sake of the account. I've spent ten years with these materials, really ten years - that's a fifth of my life. I've often loved the work. I've loved finding my competence. The moments when I saw through a wrong way of thinking about something, when I got material I hadn't been able to understand though I recognized that it was right, when I wrote my way through to the next level. I love the community of thinkers who have found or sorted some part of this way of thinking. Some of them have been artists who show their thinking in forms other than written theory. What is common to artists and theorists is the creation of the mind that makes. Style is a cognitive fact. This is work done in one community but motivated by a question that originates in another. The question is, is there a way of thinking about mind that will make sense of the way an artist knows or comes to know, and the means by which an artist brings others into knowing states. The question does not come up among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind because these communities work with the evidence they have. An artist's sense of the details of working process would be thought anomalous, something we will get to when we have understood normal cognition. My own experience, though, has been that if I hold my question in contexts where it is not being asked, I have an immediate test of theoretical plausibility. This has to be said carefully: it is not that there is 'a theory' that is good or bad. It also is not quite that there are theorists who are right or wrong. What it is, is that theory is also an art. The theory-writer, like the novelist, sets up a form that structures the reader. The test for theoretical plausibility is whether we can ask our own questions when we are being organized the way this theorist organizes us. Organized by this writer, I'm having a conversation with myself that has energy and reach. My own experience, though, has been that artist are only more self-conscious about cognitive processes that are normal. Cognitive theory that works for artists will work for other people too. What is meant by a theory that works for artists has to be said carefully. Theory is also an art. So it is not just that 'a theory' is good or bad. It is also not quite that a theorist is right or wrong. The theory-maker, like any essayist, sets up a form that structures the reader. The question then is, structured the way this theorist structures me, can I ask my own questions? Organized by this writer, am I having a conversation that gives those questions energy and reach? Am I in a more coherent state, do I know more? What it's like so far, trying to write. Say first I have an appointment with Tom on Saturday morning. The book says talk about your conviction that he cheated. I'm afraid of this conversation because I believe he will lie. Why should I say what I believe though he won't come through. Because then I will have to see or feel something I don't like. I wanted to say his ill-will and carelessness of me, but what I most won't like is the feeling of helpless suspension. A couple of times in the last stretch I didn't wobble and he had to cop. Why am I wobbling about this one. Why did I wobble last summer. Why don't I recognize cheating. Because I don't have child's anger. Child's anger would strengthen observation. If I'd had that sharp willingness to care I would have moved in those moments where I half-noted and didn't move. He cheated on me. Child demon is cold anger. The two-year-old's cold anger because she wasn't allowed to have hot anger. Hot anger stays in touch with early love, cold anger does not. And the real destruction is loss of early love. I should have been angry all along. Feeling the loss of Tom, of what he truly gave me, which was what he truly had, his realness always, because his realness was always there with his unrealness. Staying safe in hopelessness. Hope is heart's truth. Going for broke means living in heart's deep truth. That's the freedom I wish for. Lying means holding back hope. It's a meanness with self. 19 So I am going to do this unsafe thing and phone Stacey, whoever she is - maybe I am doing it mainly so I can say I did it - and see whether I can flush him. Is this cold anger? Yes but it's not hopeless. It hopes to get to the bottom of this story. Having committed myself to action I'm angry, and where I'm angry is at the heart. I didn't know that. 20 What should I say to him now, I said. 'Foolish Tom come through to shared pleasure' it said. He looked real from the first. Which one is that, so I'll know him. The one I think of as the young husband. He smiles. He's slightly abashed. I told my story. We were sitting in the car at Embarcadero Park looking east under many-stemmed bottlebrush trees. The best part was later when he told his. He said what he most regretted is the way he has been controlled by a persona so that many times after I've left he has felt he missed a chance, and that if he could have been his intelligent sensitive and real self we would have had an extraordinary breakthrough. Music and musicians have been substitute creativity and if he does not have his own he will be a shell. He has to make his room a workroom. He needs to be intelligent with intelligent people and creative with creative people and responsible with responsible people. I have given him a lot intellectually and he hasn't given me credit. He has sponged off me intellectually. I said I want the deal to be no conditions on either side. I don't want him to be faithful. I won't hold him to anything about booze or dope or lying. He said, Are we going to be friends or lovers. I said Either way it has to be friends first. He got that. 21 Next day - that was good yesterday but there is still a stop in my solar. I wake this morning and say, what is this. When he said, You're in love with me - the way he does - I said, Joyce has taught me love isn't a squirt of feeling, it is when you create the conditions for someone's spirit. The way I used to be in love with you was like a baby wanting her mother. In the other sense of wanting to create the conditions of your growth yes I am still willing to be in love with you. He said, I'll take that. I see what the stop is. I would like him to have said, The conditions for your growth are that you should be like a baby wanting her mother, and I will give you those conditions. Because I'm ethical, I'm right, I'm wise, I'm way competent, etc, but I am not lit up like a baby wanting a mother she can have. I used to be that with you, I used to be that. I liked him yesterday, I liked him at first sight. I liked him at last sight too. I dropped him at the curb to go type sheets at the West. When he stepped onto the intersection in front of the car he touched his lips, his heart, the air sideways from his arm in the direction of my hood. The gesture was lovely, the way it flowed down and out. I watched him walk away - young, a boy's walk. 22nd I noticed later what else it was about the gesture. It was left-handed. 24 It was a dombeya, a tree at Anderson's Nursery, the most beautiful thing I've seen since Mary Ward's house. Unusual. Many thick grey stems the texture of an old wool sweater. Few branches lined with few leaves and many white flowers in clumps. It was mainly horizontal, like a Chinese drawing of a mountain pine, filled in with live soft grey, white and green. Eliz and I in Santee looking at gravel and paving slab, bags or wire baskets full of river rock. Rue like a jackal in the back of the truck. Driving through working class streets in El Cajon, the rocky hillsides up ahead. There is fresh grass, wild oat silky on the roadside banks. An oakleaf hydrangea, an osmanthus. 26 Friday. A state of craving since yesterday. Book said don't go speak to him. I did it in defiance and was off - embarrassed - laughing the way I do ashamedly - and didn't know what I was up to. I was watching myself puzzled why it was so wrong (which it must have been since I was so wobbly in it) to speak to him to tell him I wasn't going to speak to him but would write. I was confused. Can I only be clear when I'm saying it's over? It says when I'm in a craving state it's because I'm not feeling. If I were feeling, what would it be. Writing letters again is childish hope. Was I embarrassed to be asking for that? Tragedy is like being in love, it has fresh energy, but it wears off. Now it isn't tragedy, it's uncertainty, it's uncleanness. 28 4 on a Sunday morning, the heater fan purring, coffee in the big enamel mug, my beautiful lamp down at the end of the room, the coffee-maker's tick. At five the irrigation will come on. We'll see whether our pipe splices hold. I woke at 2:30 thinking of work, specifically this, why is it so hard? Why do I have to set it up with so much labour? Why can't I just write it? It is as if a child is struggling to do an adult's work, or as if an adult is struggling to work with a child's brain - more like that. As if I can't just go straight to it, I have to first find what I know in other people's work and then painstakingly build a detailed armature to write from. The question I have in the air is, sometimes I have found myself in a state of flow that seemed just exactly me, perfectly me - fully, freely me. It was sometimes with drugs, sometimes in work, sometimes in love, sometimes in sudden rest. What are the conditions of that state of flow? It is Tom's question too. - Sometimes in travel, sometimes in shock and grief. If my question is about knowing, then I can point it this way: what are the conditions for being in a state that can know? What is the knowing state like. It is secure - 'dropped into center.' That might mean something postural, like when I imitated Dave Carter in Joyce's office. It says, oh I'm here where I've wanted and wanted to be - I'm interested in every moment - I'm fresh and I'm light like a breeze - it is so interesting to be - I'm fearless - I am not afraid to say what I am, there's nothing I need to conceal - I am not afraid of myself - nothing I am will endanger me. Can you tell me how to get there     improve aggression so you don't withdraw from creation Aggression is what's damaged in us     YES Improve aggression thread by thread working with you     childhood betrayal has built the structure of an excluded child, so childhood betrayal is what has to be worked with. Deep change by coming through betrayal to happiness. Any more?     do it Work with whatever comes up     NO in a systematic way, exclusion is delaying inspiration and strength But method?     look for end of illusion of success by means of this work There is some connection between childhood betrayal and illusions of success     YES Look for illusions of success and end them, that's the assignment     YES Do it by meditating     Is that it?     YES 1st April Bored in the slog - day after day sorting stuff I'm not new enough to. I've written most of it before but can't patch in those texts, want it close-woven all together. Am not learning as I go, though I notice with some of the sections I have got it refined since I was there last. The pile still to do is maybe ten inches deep - close-written pages. I'm not feeling my contribution in any of what I'm doing now. Why am I wanting to lay out the floor so explicitly - a dim certainty - I want it done in one unified form. Disordered sleep. I'm faded by 8:30 and go to bed but wake so often and for such long stretches that I do not get up early enough to have much done before there's movement of people and dogs, which downgrades my quality. The fire alarm has been peeping sometimes at night, and in my sleeping state I thought it must be detecting substances I diffuse into the air when I have a hot flash. I'm physically strong and can work and don't ache. I like seeing the garden around me. The Tom self-talk is dying out as it's longer since I've seen him, but I'm not waking and sleeping work - which is what I need for quality. Afraid to check my money. Can I find someone for my place in May. Somehow that will work out, just keep going, just do it. 2nd 5:30 in the morning. Oh I feel I'm a massive old hulk who has gone past all possibility of arms and touch, a charred freighter drifting disabled. I don't even have the pleasure of capability, I'm a heavy fluid. I'm sitting with these residues of living work I did in other times, and I'm not the helicopter woman, I have no over-vision, I'm crawling among fragments. I'm leaking tears of loneliness and dreariness. And there is no sense of a welcome on the other side of the ordeal. I have lost Tom, the hope of Tom, heart for Tom. The home and pleasure, joy and sweetness I long for has been my poison and ruin. There's the sentence: every junkie's dull gaze on the drained world. She said she was often paralyzed, a pillar of salt. That story is a story about men but little girls will misunderstand it. Lot's wife was turned to salt because she looked back at the burning city which was her origin. She said it's a terrible story. She's a minimal person, simple, slow. She says she doesn't know any people, there are no people. She doesn't know Ellie. She says Ellie can remember her but doesn't know her. Ellie is confused about who dropped her. She isn't interested in making Ellie's dreams come true. She goes out of existence. Since Ellie has been speaking in groups of people she is less often present. She wants to know whether so slow a person could make a living. - I called Louie to talk about Rowen - what I did yesterday, and how I feel it as a sentence to living death. Louie was tracking well. She said, Talk to love woman. I was resisting but I did. Burst into sobs. You dropped me, you dropped me. She said she wanted to talk to love woman. I turned my chair around, and was someone else. 4th It was nearly five years before I could shed the fantasies of my abstract education. Nearly five years before, quite suddenly one day, when I was desperate for such an illumination, vision was granted me of what my material as a writer might be. I wrote very simply and fast of the simplest things in my memory .. and with that knowledge, that acknowledgment of myself (so hard before it was done, so very easy and obvious afterwards), my curiosity grew fast. I did other work, and in this concrete way, out of work that came easily to me because it was so close to me, I defined myself, and saw that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in ... All at once, within a matter of days, material and tone of voice and writing skill had locked together and begun to develop together. 147-8 To wish to ask questions, to keep true creative curiosity alive it was necessary for me to make a pattern of the knowledge I already possessed. That kind of pattern was beyond me in 1950. Because of my ideas about the writer, I took everything I saw for granted. I thought I knew it all already, like a bright student. I thought that as a writer I had only to find out what I had read about and already knew. And very soon I had nothing to record and had to stop. 146 With me, everything started from writing. Writing had brought me to England, had sent me away from England, had given me a vision of romance, had nearly broken me with disappointment. Now it was writing, the book, that gave savor, possibility, to each day, and took me on night after night. That's Naipaul, Enigma of arrival. 5 Gas Haus under radiant sky - an edge time - I'm not free to sit here and be - though there is my car at the curb gleaming as if joyful. Tom's room very near, his life going on in the beautiful light. The street tree across the way has grown a perfect shape in light that comes from many sides in a day. This part of the city is still power land for me, life - that sense of crossed light, reverb, open land with strangers passing through. I'd rather live here than anywhere - still. It's wrong to live anywhere else. 6 Lownlie - have been all day - lonely and hopeless - there was something I wanted and I'm lonely without the hope of it - when I think of what's ahead for me I want to scream with rage - I'll be back in Vancouver broke, in debt, without a lover, without a prospect - so it's not lonely I am, it's angry - everything is coming to nothing - there is not going to be a book, only a thesis - there is going to be no more success or money than there was - after all my patience and labor I am not going to succeed at all - because I'm doing what I believe in I won't even have the tiny success of the MA, which was written for the guys. I am so discouraged in this labour which is going on and on over and over the same endless confinement. I want it to come to something. I want to come to something. It has been ten years. It has been thirty years of poverty - poverty - poverty - and foolishness in love. I have never hated this work before, I loved it and believed in it and wanted to show it, and now I believe no one will see it. It will fail. What will I do - what will I do - 7 Crawling up out of a night on the ruined plains - dull uncomfortable empty - awake on and on - 9 Is there anything to tell. Work is easier since the bad night. I don't fight it, I just keep going. I have breaks but I'm not howling to get away. David Beech is lending me five hundred. "I love you," he said. "You must," I said, embarrassed. Here's the day. Second cup of tea. 10 Why when I write to Tom do I lose my flair? I get pedestrian, I sound like a little woman. He can handle the flair, he likes the flair, but I don't have it when I address him. For instance, what I've just said. It didn't occur to me to say it to him though I was thinking it with every dull sentence. I'm afraid of dads and it's there in the very texture of my thought. I'm afraid in the presence of dads, and it has done me a lot of harm. I've stuck with Tom trying to unfreeze that reflex. Presumably it's what he needs to do too though I doubt he knows it. Maybe his anger has been an unfreezing. It says no, it's automatic male policing: don't let girls unfreeze. So I ask, Tom's not really a dad, wouldn't he rather have the company of an unfrozen girl? And it says, no, Tom's structure is secret mourning. What kind of girl can live in the world of that structure? A dead girl or a gone girl. That's harsh, I say. Yes, it says. I feel I have defended myself this morning. Last night begging to know why he's been so harsh. This morning, telling him why, my tone cleared. This is as much as to say, you've had your chance and you didn't want it     Will he see it's true     So it's this moment that really is the end     It's kind of wonderful     no, because it leaves him behind But he's an evil patriarch     no He wants me either dead or gone     YES It's true     Are you saying there's a but     love woman, something about completion, deep change, work Love woman is not supposed to leave him behind?     no, she is I'm not getting this     anger is what's needed Do you mean his     YES His anger is the way out of mourning     Do you mean if it's met correctly     Will you tell me what would be correct     unconditional love That's also the way for the girl to unfreeze     YES 11 I have a song from long ago - a dirge - To-day / we laugh and weep and / la-bour Tomorrow we / in si-lence / lie I remember the congregation singing it in English and in German. Die Zeit / is kurz / die Stunden / weilen. Was lying in the dark this morning feeling what it was for people in my grandmother's generation to sing that together, a tune like salt water in heavy swells. Fizzing outside. It's Sunday, the sprinklers came on at 5:30. I'm just wanting to be personal for a little before I sit at the table. Rowen yesterday said he didn't want to leave Read. Then he said he wanted to think about it after he and I and Michael have talked about it all of us together. He said it in his lower voice very decisively. Last night remembering what it was like to be with Greg. He was a physical treasure, I want to say now. We didn't fight, we fucked once a week, we talked, we cooked, we traveled, we kept each other stable so we could work. I liked his mum. His family was smart and established. He was sane and honest. I trusted him. I flourished with him. And then I went on to Roy. And Greg went on to dogs and an interior decorator in Ottawa. Obviously I am talking about Greg because I went on to Roy again. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Maryland yesterday looking at the second window up from the M on the awning, seeing it closed and thinking, is the window closed because he was away for the night? He's at Lorrie's? - And then I think, if he is, then something that is true is becoming real, and that is better for both of us. And would I like Greg again? Not Greg, but an equivalent at this level? Yes - now I would. I had miles to go, but I've gone them and now a smart kind honest sane and physical man would be a heaven I would know to keep. Oh it's one of the days that has a bite - I spoke to Tom on the phone, since I was taking the day off, it seemed. There was his voice, which I will never not like, a good voice. It was a conversation lost on both sides, I guess. "The unexpected strength of the bond between us," he said. That floored me. I was stammering. Nothing about the strength of the bond wasn't known to me, what I have is a well of sadness about the way these four months have been. What I meant was, where have you been, to say a thing like that? He doesn't want to put me off my stride. The way we're doing this, with letters, is right. He's fifty-fifty about whether we should try again or not, if I want to he'll do it, he does know he doesn't ever want me out of his life. He has his routine, work's under control, he hasn't got it together for email at the library, he doesn't want to talk, he wants to save it and write it. Every day he lifts the phone to check that it's plugged in. He doesn't want to go off the deep end. He doesn't know whether this was the last rattle of the skeletons. I say I need to get heavier probably. He says he needs me to. Beyond that, we know I'm going home. 12 Beyond that, this morning looking at notes on Langacker's book I'm shrieking with shame and pain, that I had a chance with this community and didn't use it, didn't once speak up in Gilles' extraordinary seminar, didn't use Pat and Paul's generosity, couldn't handle it. What I did instead was obsess about Tom. I'm hanging my head. I thought I'd have another chance, come back as a post doc. It has been very hard for me feeling I'm trying to push through a back door. I haven't made myself do it. I've just slogged at home. This is terrifying. I haven't taken my place. This is what I should have been working on - I should have been working with being afraid to take my place. I'm alarmed. I'm ashamed. I'm afraid. I blew it, I gave it all away, I gave it away, because I hadn't done the work with my dad. There was disorder in the foundation and it has cost me horribly. - And now I'm sorry the other way. I'm sorry I didn't get it right with Tom. 13 Yesterday crying with remorse and despair. Today sitting in Nora's garden looking up the slope where Tom and I dug, hearing a bird with three notes like running water. Salvias basking, spreading their beautiful constructions of stem and leaf and breaking into small vivid color at a few tips - deep sky blue, primary red, magenta pink, and one I like best a shaggy brown-burgundy brick-red. Splendens van Houttei. She also has karwinskii, clevelandei, greggii, elegans, leucantha, apiana, officinalis Berggaarden, cacaliaefolia, canariensis, chamaedryoides, 'Indigo spires'. Eliz has africana-lutea, involucrata, leucophylla 'Bee's bliss'. What I saw plainly today was that I've been mad at Tom for not giving me what I reckoned he owed me since he was offering to be my man - nine things I listed - none of which were things he contracted to or had to offer, only things I wanted. Being mad at him for not giving what I thought he owed made me defiant and rebellious about appreciating anything else: you want me to appreciate you for giving me this junk instead of what you owe me? And he's fed up, rightly. The things I want are things I'd rightly like and would flourish with but they are not owed me by anyone who isn't my dad. They are things I can look for if I want. 16 It's hot. Gas Haus early afternoon. The dogs last night tearing up a skunk. I'm worried about money. Even with David's 500 and my mum's 150, there are more months of loan payments and insurance draws. Music these days cuts sharp. Beautiful letter from Luke. I haven't worked yet today. The boy with no nose walks in holding a girl's hand. Louie on the phone this morning talking about Oritz the Israeli yoga wonder asked do I have something written she can send, about how to speak so mind and body are not held separate. I said maybe what I'm writing now, since I am not having to go for scholarships and can write for myself. Yes, work, which I have no large sense of, but will, again - Will I stop saying I have no husband? Will my eyes stop stinging? I am saying to him, I was fighting to be able to stay with you, all my insults were that. I was trying to stay with you. You aren't ever going to understand it. Bees in the mailbox. That's what it was.   I don't want to go home. 17 Writing Tom in the night about loneliness I said maybe I'm lonely for my greatness. 18 Luke on the phone. Hello says a man. His voice. He said he liked my smell. Sometimes he smells like that. Sometimes he smells like Roy. The woman in South Africa is tall, loud, cheerful, forgiving. Big. He told the story of Catherine 97 years old flown to South Africa last Christmas with Roy, Ezra and Illy, Hannah, and the new wife. She first traveled to Africa at nineteen, and lived there until just after Luke was born. She was seventy when Roy and I went to Southhampton to fetch her. Gordon saw her onto the ship in Capetown, she says now. Roy taking her back for one last visit, with children he'd had by three women. The span of Catherine's young spirit, which involved me briefly to give us all Luke, who was her darling from the first and loves her kindly and truly back. 20 Yes I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the guise of Hyde. volume 17 the golden west volume 16: 1998-1999 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project