the golden west volume 20 part 2 - 2000 may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver 11th May The children who sat opposite us on the trolley when we went for a ride one Friday evening were a stringbean girl in a junior high prom dress, spangly sleeveless bodice, white chiffon skirt, and a boy the same age, skateboard shorts and sleeveless teeshirt. It had been his idea to jump on the trolley. She sat putting her black hair up, scolding him. Jason you are such an idiot. He looked at the two of us beaming. Can we turn around and come back the same way? Yes, we said. She got up and jumped off after two stops. He followed her grinning, a tanned boy with a cowlick. They were us, Tom said yesterday when we were on the airport bus passing through the zone near the train station. What I'd felt though I didn't realize it. When I had just got to SD and was unpacking in his room he lay on the bed and I put on and took off my new clothes to show him. When he saw the leopard skin he blushed. Outside the terminal on a bench, yesterday, I talked about reading his Bellingham notebook. There was a moment when he unconsciously shifted himself an inch closer to me. That was the moment I earned by going through the process with myself while he was at work. He had been his old self solemnly avowing and facetious. Frightening and distancing. And now quiet putting his head on my shoulder. The card in his wallet with his lifetime list of people he wants told if he dies. "My sons don't know me well, so they should talk to some of the people named above." What else. The second poke, after I'd run away to the Thriftilodge and come back, where I felt every stroke. A couple of days of anguish after that. I stayed with it and showed it to him though it felt unacceptable. He held me and snuffled in my ear and told me a brilliant story about a dog that was supposed to sleep on my porch but got the door open and crept up the stairs and drank in the toilet bowl and clambered (there's no word for that motion) onto the bed trying not to wake me and then had the excruciating problem of having to turn around before lying down. He was all the way into the dog. When I said I'd watch the Laker's game his body opened up into its best furry bliss. He lay holding me stroking the skin of my upper arm. That was what made me feel every stroke next morning. Joe Flores died probably. He was on his bench next to the West and keeled over. Luminous sweetness of his last years on the street. [He didn't die.] The first or second night Tom was at the closet and lowered his pyjama bottom and waggled his ass at me. I want to see the other side too, I said. He turned around and held his big balls and his square-headed dick to show them. I couldn't write any of this while I was there, why? At the time, when I'm with him, I'm not fully realizing, I'm sub-energized. It's not just with him I'm subenergized, but I'm dimly realizing it when I'm with him. I'm often saying, I'm less present than I was, why? It says the problem isn't energy, it's withdrawal. Habitual withdrawal that happened with my father. He also has habitual withdrawal with his father. But he's with his mother. Talk to Joyce about that. And what else. Waiting. Suspended life. And professional fear. Being stopped by even small rejections. That's a kind of withdrawal. Blanking out around men. Look at that sequence of handwriting. It's the mechanism isn't it. Energy goes to analysis. But it's not the mechanism at the time. At the time it's just blanking. Crisis juices it, which is why I come through when I go into fear or anger etc. This is the whole crux I think. Analysis afterwards is a way of getting energy again. And tea has something to do with it. What I learned today. A lot. Read a lot of papers. Mammals' big eyes and big visual cortex from being nocturnal predators. Forward gaze for the pounce, overlapping fields. Primate visual-spatial memory from being fruitivors and having to keep track of fruiting times. Day vision. Primate subgroup social development from having mobile upper lip as well as forward gaze, acuity. Auditory simulation of moving sound source - parietal spatial object perception. Parietal spatial object analysis. Inferotemporal canonical view. Therefore perspective drawing and development of the parietal which is a different kind of simulation. Spatial attention to object as such. The something the other qualities need to be qualities of. Attention to spatial qualities of object relevant to grasp. Object geometry. Spatial attention a network, ie to location. 12 His best of moments. "I am more deeply in love with you than I have ever been." The trust he comes through to. On the phone last night. And yet: he doesn't want to buy a $5 phone card before Monday. And when he told me the story of an article he didn't know I'd also read, I watched how inexactly he had taken its gist. It was the one about autistics (he called them aphasics) laughing at Reagan lying on TV. He elaborated it. My question for Joyce. How to know whether this relation is good for me. It is bringing up jets of brilliance in him but not in me. It takes so much of my time and money I am nothing but stalled economically, etc. Could it bring up jets of brilliance in me    Without change in him    Will you say how     improve, coming through, childish withdrawal Aggression around men    Automatic    It's an eternal problem for women    In a crisis I tower up and take my size     YES Do you have any suggestions     come through decision to temper by responsibility Be more responsible     and less Responsibility counters withdrawal    Less responsible in the sense of not controlling them    What she said was: 1) When you're blank examine the blankness with all your might. She guesses it's anger I'm not feeling. "Blankness is very exciting." 2) Lie, cheat, steal, murder, do anything you need to do to get some security, get yourself into the game. It's time you stopped being on the sidelines. 3) What we're on earth for is to become conscious all the time. - That was where I dug in my heels and said I don't want the program. Rage at religious pressure. Fuckin' adults wanting to pervert you to their way of thinking. Get off me. We had an unloving parting. She said, When you're a professor come see me. She rode fifteen hours in a taxi in 44 degree heat. She'd ask a stranger to open her water bottle. The man with the long beard is the one who told her what we're born for. You're still doing it, I muttered. Fell into a muddle thinking I shouldn't have brought up her loss of capacity. She says she loses physical capacity but her spirit is as strong as ever. I don't believe her. She examines everything, she says. Beliefs that aren't examined are dead sea scrolls. Everything is new. Is she right about lying cheating stealing     no The work she has done for both of us    The little shell is in Buddha's lap    In the place of the work    We choose what we're on earth for    Will you tell me what I should be on earth for     battle   Who will I tell my stories, now - the rock in the river, the little shell on Buddha's lap. It's the only present I've given her. Will you tell me battle against what     exclusion I'd rather write than be a professor    Can I be accepted as a writer    13 Saturday morning - oh aren't the windows dirty - sun shining through them shows the muck. - A lout behind me as I swept up a sidewalk on my bike, "Wow, baby, still in good shape." I was wearing my black jeans and poloneck tee with long sleeves. I'm tanned. I look the way I do when I come back from California, vivid and handsome, with eyelids. The bike seat raises my rump and I still have that spine curve at the back of the waist. Nathalie with a center part, looking like a little Quaker, saying the research she's doing is the first creative work of her life. She's not mainstream though she thought she was. She has been neglected all her life, she says. Give me an example, I say. Her examples are all examples of people being what the book calls withdrawn: shut down. 14 Remember earlier in this work, when I felt I was creating for the first time. Everything before had been some gifted, but random and unconscious. The creative feeling [in philosophy] was a feeling of surveying a very wide field and being able to resolve it. Something like that. Can I be there when I'm presenting what isn't new to me now     act and fight to improve heartache My own?     no, everyone's The creation now is in getting it through    Which heartbreak     the decision to delay responsible intelligence Is this book going to be published    I've always wanted to do that    This is a way of targeting it to people who want to do it     - An old woman, very bulky. I find her refrigerator full of old bread in transparent plastic bags of different sizes. Nothing but bread. Brown bread. I talk to her expecting to find her senile but she is lucid. She says she's living half in the earth. 15 What's it like today. The day itself is fresh blue and green, lambent. I began at 5:30 with the précis of the intro - two long sections from last spring, parts of the intro I wrote in Eliz's guesthouse and at the table in Borrego. Put them into the computer and went downtown and printed them. I'm not writing yet. Don't know how to patch and piece, which this process so much is. A feeling of being without present grip. And yet writing all of it fresh is unthinkable. I'm not the person of the best of the writing. There are different stances and intentions, which are different voices. In some I'm the artist, in some the academic philosopher, in some the true unpublishable soul. I can be synoptic, my thorough way (here waiting for Tom to phone, cos it's seven) of making an outline from the parts assembled. Not sure that's the way. I feel I ought to be holding my hands open saying tell me what to write and I'll write it, not trying to arrange a fridge full of old bread. It's wrong not to have faith in the moment. And yet a long project is about accumulating and improving - using the best of what was found in many times - maybe. There have been times with true impulse. I'm at a different time now. Alright. Which time. The rounding off and completing time. The presenting time. Thinking how to present. Alright. To whom. Listen and you'll hear to whom. Okay, I believe that. It's a kind of time I've never had. Don't assume how to do it. Is this right so far? Be candid to be credible, don't inflate. Find the best of the writing and get to that speed. 17 Back a week and I'm ready. Long table dragged upstairs has the parts of the intro on it. Money for two and a half months. All the outlines in their piles. A quiet house. Happy stability with Tom. Friends for evenings. Summer light, warm rooms. A working bike and car and body. The moment to bring it through. It's no longer too soon. I'm no longer dragging myself to it, starved for another life. The project is whole enough so I don't have to keep myself back from succeeding because it would distract me from what I still need to find. I can stand on this. I am what I was intending to be. Or I am about to be. Now I take the step into writing it, giving it, showing it, being seen as it. There is the pressing at the heart that means effort. Do you want to talk to me     keep a reserve of strength, don't do too much in a day Any more     break the excluded child's habits, to balance in coming through Habits of needing comfort     YES Indulge it in the evening     More about something else?     crisis There's a crisis I'm not feeling     YES, early love has to be honest to recover responsibility Emotional responsibility in the evening, is that what you mean    Any more?     begin 18 I wanted to remember this dream. I arrive in a cabin in the woods. It's a cabin made of stone. I arrive in it from somewhere else, so I exit from it without having entered it. I go out the door and find another door. I come out into a grove of willows, yellow crescent leaves on the ground. I come out onto the home yard from the north, from the back. Large patches of ground are covered with red embers. There were big buildings, a house, business buildings. I like it that they're gone. Yesterday started to write about art, what's known in art, how it is known. I hadn't thought much about it but I can see I should expand it, it's what would explain me to the professors and if it's good would win the better artists, especially about writing. The sense of what it's like to know in me, which I am calling in art. Lifelong intentness on what it's like to be. - ~Excited. (New pyjamas, dark green print. Today at Pilgrim's Market, also a green raincoat with a hood, and olive green pants.) I went to the gym for the first time. Sinking footfalls on the stairmaster. For stamina in writing, for the next twenty years, for the drive through this stage, for the cut of my ass. (It sighed yes.) What's happening in work (it's nine, getting dark, Out front just finished on CBC) - ask me tomorrow, I'm not working now. 19 Difficulty of working between paper and computer. I don't want to write by hand what I'll have to reenter in the computer but when it's in the computer I can't re-read it and get speed from it and revise for coherence. It feels blind. I need the printer. How an artist knows, sci vis, what it has to do with recognizing another epistemology. The guy on CBC last night talking about what's meant by rich color. If a green is made by mixing blue and yellow pigments rather than with plain green pigments, more of the light in a room will be reflected, the atmosphere of the room will have more wavelengths active. That was a beautiful description. There will be more reactive surface for the reflection of other colors in the room. 20 That kind of dreaming - it's not deep - it's not deep, felt summary - it's as if entertainment dreaming - like being somewhere I haven't been - odd things happen - like being in a café in Vienna on a Sunday and being taken home to dinner and taken out to the public garden. I was in a neighbourhood somewhere between the neighbourhood I'd come from and the neighbourhood I was going to. Sat on a stoop for a while and saw at a distance a black man in a pointed hat, in some kind of interaction with a white person. People were displaying things on the street. A woman had built a replica of one of her rooms on the street corner, medicines, books, knick-knacks, all the little things. I'm not remembering this well. More displays. I get a glimpse of children's shoes, one each, different sizes. What I was feeling about the neighbourhood was the looseness and invention and interestingness of the poor class, unlike the dullness of the ambitious class. A feeling that my project is rotten at the core, is it?    NO Why do I feel it. The patched-together introduction. All the patched-togetherness. The way I can't just write from beginning to end, something high and coherent and "tightly written, cutting edge." Doubts about the personal stuff. As if I think I am trying to describe something but (really I am just trying to display my living room on the street) the only thing that can be done is invention. - What did I do today, not much, it feels. Reorganized the method section, wrote a bit of it. Rewrote from some bits of what I've patched. Maybe felt for tone, maybe felt for shape. 21 Grumbling about those people. Nathalie's birthday dinner at the Alibi Room. Loki, Maria, and various fashionable souls. The music was so loud in the high-ceilinged space above us that we were squashed down onto the table surface seeing people's mouths moving to no effect. People seemed shells of appearance. At the next table a movie crowd celebrating something. The women in makeup seemed pitiful creatures, glitter on their eyelids, thick red pushed past the actual edges of their mouths. Urrasti whores. I felt implicated, in my leopard-trimmed jacket, in trying pathetically and venally too hard. Venal is what they were. It means something about emptiness. It means being so lost you have no sense of quality, you like the Alibi room for its suggestion of participation in power, and do not have the native sense to feel how it destroys fellowship. Where have there been good parties. Louie's parties where there are real people, work parties at the garden. Nathalie had invited her next young man, a shy Japanese too young for her. The minute he went to the washroom she was saying, Well? What do you think? All the women dived onto him. Was he cute? Was he interested? Was he gay? There was Nathalie in her ugly raccoon glasses - she doesn't need glasses - desperate for new blood. There was Loki twitching and grinning talking about "my five year old" because he has very recently shacked up with an angel-faced hairdresser with three kids. What's meant by substance in a person. Something really like fiber, I'm feeling. Janet has substance, Tom has substance though he tries not to. Something that isn't shell. Speech and action issuing from deeper in, a core. Maybe it's literally core - brainstem - a fountain up from earliest time, integrating by central force. Being continuous with animal and early self. It is a picture I like. Is it true? Yes it says. I'm not ready to start yet. Coming to, slowly. What do I want first. I need to conceive of success as something other than the Alibi Room and good haircuts (though the scallop and lemon grass soup for $4 was delicious), because if that's it I'll stay with the poor people. It's completion of learning to come through foolishness, it says. Both the poor and the rich are foolish. Look to process illusion and regret. Mine? Theirs. Learning and teaching. That emptiness is my assignment. Success is my assignment not my aim. Alright. Withdraw by improving evasion of power: if you don't evade power it keeps you separate. You are corrupt already. Evading power is part of your corruption. What is the power I evade    leadership I'm not nearly alert enough    no, it's not about alertness, it's about responsibility to what you do perceive Don't write the vision, write from it. Don't imagine you're writing the vision, just write from it. Peter Brook talking about native theatre - the audience seeing one thing and seeming to see another - makes it clear - get the quote, maybe. Any representational act is that. 22nd Rowen's birthday, I think. Strange that I'm not sure. He's fifteen. Victoria Day morning. I'll go unplug that refrigerator. Unplug the radio too, it has a hum even when it's off. Better now. I can hear the space in the alley, water boiling in the kitchen. Then sunshine on the blue wall. It has begun to be the season when there are flowers in the house. Dame's rocket. The best of the rose scents. I want to say raspberry smell but it isn't. The smell has a raspberry color though the rose doesn't. (It's Kathleen Harrop, I think. Medium pink.) The reason I can't talk about the smell is, first, that I can't easily evoke scents. As if the scent isn't on a reentrant circuit. Though it can be, presumably. And then secondly that I don't have names I can use to evoke it. - Starting to work, see. Still working among tones. I've set together bits from everything I've written, including grant applications. I have personal simplicity next to compressed impressor text next to neutral limpid explication (Brain and imagining and the first SSHRC application). Hack academic passages. In the papers I wrote under pressure there's a swift humor that arrives later in. It's not just tone. The voices are interested in different things. The hack academic is dutifully making transitions, setting up points. Personal simplicity (Leaving the land, parts of Brain and metaphor) is pleasing and easy to read. The child likes it. The professors don't. Do they dislike it for a good reason? It's not tight-knit enough. What does 'tightly written' mean. Presumably it's a speed. It's fast but light. Perception without representation took it further. That was my best tone but it was too good. The professors can't read it. I have to be readable, this time. I don't see how this patching method can ever even out to something good, but it seems to be my only way. Am I doing it as well as I can? It says yes. Really my best ever tone is the best of the journal tones, always a relation of writing and having been there. My first four paragraphs are good. It should follow from that. I'm still floundering. I haven't found the voice. Straight in is the only way to find it. I can't go straight in on this one, there's too much. Is there a solution? Finish the writing by reserving action, it says. Leave some fixing till later. Do what I can now and go on. Be swift. The voice will come from the whole? Yes. 23 With Louie for an hour sitting on her floor. It was getting dark. She told about an evening at Ina's where six people brought four cuts of music each and they sipped a joint. She was instantly body - nipples and ass (where have you been?!) - and then the music. She didn't care what anyone thought of her. There was a lag between language and everything else, she thought, which makes the language anxious. But the music she had brought, a violinist Hansi recommended: the recording was so good she could hear the woman breathing. After a while that was all she heard. It was the sound of skill, someone staying with it. The music a pure line. In the last ten minutes, when it was already dark and a rectangle of yellow light had appeared on the yellow carpet between us, I found myself having moved a few feet forward. I was talking about what it was like to write yesterday. What I can do with Louie and nowhere else, that becoming of my whole self, the journal self. I told her about the two CBC stories that belong with her story about the violinist's breathing. Peter Brooks saying the audience is seeing you and then gradually seeing something else too. The color consultant saying a wall color made with many different pigments will be able to reflect many more wavelengths into the room, so the atmosphere will be full. What it is about the violinist's breathing is also that you hear the breathing by becoming it, and when you become it you become the pacing of the skill, something about the skill. How does the paint with more kinds of molecular structure belong. Well, metaphorically. The more kinds of structure intersecting in the brain. (Turrell on color.) It's a picture I can use to set up a structure that can be touched off later. Have I got the point? It says no. It's like an anchor story. It's about the book. It's about who I am. I've made myself in many topics and they reflect to the middle, and everything reflected interacts. And from that live interacting I am making. Does it mean wave interference in the brain? Sure. More? Yes - action, judgment, leadership, power. You mean responsibility? Yes. A stronger mixture? Yes. I'm picking up? Yes. Being a point of focus. Yes. Was Gibson intuiting that? Yes. Do you want to say more     finish, processing, the oppression, of loss I have done so     Are you pleased     YES It was part of making the pigment    More?     you have been honest What's the center of what I'm saying - how to understand representation - 'communication' really - and thereby thinking - as a tissue of perceiving/acting and imagining. That perceiving requires becoming something - not becoming the thing, but becoming something specific to the thing. That imagining is also that. 24 Jesus would be appalled at the church     YES Should early love stay alive    In its early form    As love for the actual mother    I should have early love for Mary    Who is unreliable    I feel the reluctance    Which cuts off core    Feeding is a way to be it    Is that it for now     no, something you should do, start to earn by writing Work on the web site in the evening     yes - Wednesday night getting Ch.2 Cognitive bodies ready. It was clearer than in April. Shopping in the wide world, basket full of colors. After, talking to Nathalie who has understood what her frenzy was about and spoke wonderfully about my work and hers. Gesture and syntax, for instance. Where did she get it? What is apparent to me is apparent to her. Then went to the gym and did 10 minutes on the stairmaster, 20 on the bike and two sets of squats. Rowen yesterday when I phoned him said he had news to tell me. "I've decided to come to town and go to school." Tired. 'Bye. 25 Do you want to talk to me about anything    action What you were talking about yesterday     Anything else     something about construction Keep going back to the beginning    You're on my side in this    because it's for improvement More?     it balances in the crisis of honest conclusions So there has to be bravery as well as intelligence    Because the honest conclusions aren't wanted     26 It's raining. I'm tired, I think. The delicious rasp in tea. My writing/reading drug I discovered - now I realize - in those ecstatic mornings reading Anna Karenina with tea and bread and honey in Mrs O'Hare's rooming house on Walton Road. Yesterday sinking into my break-nap, not sinking easily, working to sink, I got to the state where I feel atmospheres. I thought of Rudy's Liz and felt immediately the reach of light and air outside her door in Alberta. Something about making a culture. Dorothy Richardson founded a culture, I mean made its root or something of the sort, though the culture hasn't sprung up. It has in me. I was thinking about women's culture as I got out of bed and peed and made tea. Women studying business and engineering are like Chine Acheba going to university and studying English literature. It's necessary but there is something else to be made that is the strong flowering from the native root. I don't like to be such a hack in my metaphor but I'm seeing a flower something like the naked lily that shoots up without leaves (but a single flower not a clump), conspicuous and quite sudden. Pink. It comes up through other plants' leaves. But DR is not a bulb. She's more like a Japanese radish. "Louie and I were driving east," etc. Beginning by imagining the world with the men removed, the men having left their bridges, high rises, highways, surgical technologies etc. Yesterday in the offices of the Vancouver School Board, a large room with a warren of chest-high grey cubicles, each with an educated woman in her 30s or 40s, a computer and a small cork board with six or seven greeting cards tacked up. The collection of stupid sentimental images seemed declarations of the beings of the women who work there. I could hear the same girl-culture dreary flabby false-personal tone in the talk. Are women rising through?    Am I writing something for them    Will they be able to recognize it     YES Cultures now will be interspersed not clumped    Is my relation with you something specific to women     no But women will be more interested    High culture    It's a culture of perception     YES And distance perception    Does Witelson think women are the lexes    Would she say why    They are evolved to perceive particulars    Anything else you want to talk about quickly     learn addiction to intelligence/work woman I?     no, they The cubicle women     YES Colonized     YES That's what it's an image of     YES More?     build by acting on the child's intelligence You mean their intelligence is childish     Undeveloped    Real intelligence is lesbian    Grows in their own ethos     Any honest woman is lesbian in that sense    A lesbian fucks men for the right reasons, which are not cultural    But energetic    LM Montgomery     YES Is part of the root    27 The computer is mysterious. Yesterday I worked through the morning to set up the About chapter. I closed the document I was cutting from and suddenly About was gone. I can't quite remember this now, but yesterday after I was at the gym I was seeing a sort of icon of a fit energetic man. It was fetched up by a sensation, I think. Ten minutes on stairmaster, twenty on the bike, take an aspirin for little aches that arrive when I go to bed. (Don't, it says, process them till they're gone.) Do you want to talk to me about anything     graduating About after?    don't refuse to be successful with fools I always have refused    The point is there are more of them?     no the point is the anger is dishonest I want fools to honor me     YES But I believe they won't    Will they     YES For good reasons?    Do I have to suck up to them    Will you explain     wealth, is defeated, if you hold back, what you have to teach They can't use it     no they can Explain sucking up     not withdrawing, mutual construction, balancing, succeeding List?    Be everywhere the way I am when I'm teaching    Don't be lazy     YES Be queenly     YES Alright I'm willing    But I need more energy for that     YES Make energy and save energy     YES Anything else?     teach, judgment, completing, love woman It's women I'm supposed to teach     YES Wanting to put up photos of completed women     YES Work woman is a lesbian    Love woman is het    That's the long and short of it, two-spirit people    I should always have two lovers    Could work woman and love woman have each other as lovers     Is that the best way to do it    Women are completed that way    28 Do natives see me as native for reasons other than that I'm brown    Something they feel     Is work woman native    Was I possessed by a native    Love woman is myself but delayed    Because work woman had pushed in     no Was it because she was delayed work woman could push in    Ww is my genius    The sad old responsible spirit    It's a book isn't it     YES For the deftness when I pick up the pin I thank the monkey    Are many children inhabited by someone other than themselves    I am going to write other books    A book about childhood    Those two drawings     Is being possessed by a native being possessed by the land    That means a deep structuring    More integration than there usually is     YES Finish it and go back to personal writing    Should I think of myself as building beautiful evenings too    Is About going okay     Prune and fit it and then make it true    29 Going to bed late, having had an evening. Good talk with Louie. Four dollar flan at Santos Tapas among the lights music artificial flowers strangers bottles and glasses. (For Louie less a physical place, more a social place: the man wanting the woman who.... I wouldn't have noticed and am so bored when it's pointed out that I won't say more.) Start with this - if I go to bed at 11 I don't wake in the night and then am awake earlier and fresher. We started in the hall, where the sun was all the difference after two days of rain. Blue green red yellow. Life, life. We sat on the pink carpet and she told me a dream. When the sun left us we went into my room, where it was warm and smelled of roses, and sat on the bed and I talked about work. We went to Santos Tapas as it was starting to get dark on the Drive, and then to her house when it was night. I lay on the bed and she sat on the floor and read me her story about her breakdown. And then brought me home. 1. Her dream. She's in a bus. I'm in the center of the seat, she's on my right. The new woman is on my left. Tom sits facing the three of us. I am all wrapped up with the new woman, who is a tall strong healthy young woman. Louie begins to feel unbearably neglected. She says, Can I talk to you in Afrikaans. We are traveling in Russia. She steps out of the bus into a blizzard. Swirls and windmills of snow. She sees a woman she thinks she knows. It must be Elise, who she hasn't seen in ten years. The woman is wearing a red silk coverall and is made up like a prostitute. What are you doing these days? The woman says, I'm the murderer. Then she's gone. Louie has to leave me but without me she'll die. How can she get home? There is a young dykey woman with short hair. Maybe she can get home with her. But the woman looks at the two of us, Louie streaked with tears, speaking Africaans, and says no. And is gone. She sees an old woman in a cage. It's my mother. A tall regal woman ninety years old, Mother Russia. She steps into the cage to say hello. The old woman speaks to her in French. She feels immediately calm in the atmosphere of old civilization. What the woman says is, Peutêtre qu'il serrait possible d'entrer dans les chambres delicates. Then she's gone. Louie is desperate. She must go away alone. If she goes away she'll die. But she cannot stay with the pain. She strikes out into the blizzard. She sees just snow and people's legs. She's going to die. She howls in agony, sobs and sobs. What has she done. She calls me. Ell-llie. She knows she has gone too far. The snow is too thick. But when she turns around there I am leaning calmly on a fence. 2. What I said about my work. I said what I want to do next is write a book about the childhood of the philosopher. I blushed after I had said it, sat holding my hand to my cheek. 3. Her story about her breakdown written fast and plainly without her usual verbal rebellion, just telling the story of depression, crisis, starving herself, fooling people, and coming to the moment when she phones her mother crying and says, I can't do it any more, I give up, and has to be seen in the shame of failure and be taken to a doctor who offers her shelter in a hospital. Do you understand Louie's dream     YES It's the story of her breakdown    I'm in the center because I'm you    Desperation of the real self having gone away    The vignettes were false solutions    Thinking of sexuality as the murderer     Old civilization and its repressions and refinements     Boyishness    The solution was being willing to die    Sexuality isn't the murderer, lying is     It's a wonderful dream    Was the self busy elsewhere     no She understood it on the model of the mother    When she got out she knew how to lie and tell the truth, both     She could hold the difference    The other woman a kind of fabrication     YES The constellation of four a dynamic constellation    The isolation of the right hemisphere    Younger self    She'd been wrapped up in the left, the talking self    Is the one in the middle brainstem, core?    The impartial center       Did you like what I said about the childhood of the philosopher    The blush was nice     no Why not     it comes from withdrawnness I thought of it as coming forward but I should never have been withdrawn     I sent Representing continuity to Mary Tiles today. 30 Anything you want to talk about     balanced forces, work woman, intimacy, coming through Work woman can begin to come through    More?     early love looked for defeat and recovery, learn to process fantasies of sharing The fantasies that happen when I try to share     When work woman tries to share    There are many, still     YES Just go on processing them    Are they work woman's fantasies    Silence silence silence throughout childhood More?     you are growing slowly Will you tell me some fantasies    A list    Four cards?     no Will you tell me how many     seven The seven of the fantasies card (7c)    Can you put my hand on the fantasies card     yes (it does) Physical glamour, wealth, mystery, fame, power, social prominence, cunning - these are illusions because they are not worth having?     It's illusions about them    Things that intimidate me!     When I run into these I get halted    Work woman does    Intimidated because in conflict about having them     Therefore in conflict about sharing with people who have them    I didn't do very well with Nora     no, you did Anything else     intimidations all based on the family Which is why the Republicans ...     Sharing, success and action are partly lost    early love balancing in relation to betrayal gives an overview That's the way to handle any of these intimidations    What you're talking about really is intimidation     YES Joyce has fallen for an intimidation     YES, by honesty and bravery graduate from oppression I'm willing    More     love woman's anger at men is still unresolved Sexual anger     YES 'Intelligent succubus'     YES You're adding that    It's the anger I pacify     YES, truth balances and graduates love woman Feel the sexual anger more     YES And that helps to balance and graduate work woman    teaching intimacy to Tom is partial loss Has decreased it    So work woman can come forward    Fear of sexual anger kept me silent     YES 31st So organized. Beautiful food every day, cooked in the morning, takes 10 minutes to make. Salad in the evening, takes 5. Yoga half hour during a midday break. Half hour in the gym. Increasing the sweat. Two more floors on stairmaster, more miles on the bike. Come out perky, not computer-bashed. First 14 pages of Aboutness almost right. Last half tomorrow. Start Wide nets on Friday. Talk to the book in the morning, Tom every other day. Now step up writing. [various ideas for publishing] Anything you want to say about the mailing out     you're afraid to be betrayed   part 3 the golden west volume 20: 2000 april-september work & days: a lifetime journal project