Vancouver, 27th
I'm home, I'm alone.
Where should I begin.
I'm still silent. I suppose I should think about that month. I'm not sharp.
The description ahead of time was very accurate, and yet I went under, into murk. Mostly I was in murk. Why?
It got clear when I said he doesn't love me and has never loved anyone. It got clear when I said he doesn't have to love me, I'll still be there. It was clear when I waited for him at the lamp post and hugged him. It was clear when I held him round when he was cold waiting for the ferry. It was clear when I stepped out of the car into desert air on Highway 92, and later on Black Canyon Road, when the air had the scent of honey. Does pleasure having my clit licked when I experimented with making my pussy smile count as clear? It says yes. Does soldiering through gagging on his dick because I wanted to give him something for his effort count? Is it okay to do that horrible thing? It says yes.
I experience his flattery, exaggeration, pleading, and sentiment as torture: I love you, you're beautiful, you're a genius, do you love me.
Verbal and sexual dishonesty exhausts me. He was trying to love me, be worthy of me, hold me, an exercise like being ticketed endlessly by a security cop. He was longing to get away to where dogs play, buy a van, be an old man living alone.
The relationship talk exhausted me.
There was a moment I liked, that made us laugh. We were lying on the bed together. He was speedy after body-whomping at Land 'n' Sea. Had his head up talking, talking. I reached up without thinking and smacked his head down firmly on the pillow.
When I had him read Mary's story of my birth aloud to me - because that way he'd have to read it slowly enough - he came to tears four times.
His explanation of street terms for women, in the parking lot on F street, half out of the rented yellow Mustang, looking at groups of people on their way to dinner and the bars. Foxes, boxes, good eatin', screamin' pussy, hot mamas.
The morning Louie phoned at 6 in panic because the banks had bailed out. Tom ironing a shirt angrily muttering, I ignoring him, finding a chance to break Louie into laughing, knowing he'd hate the intimate sound. He went to work fifteen minutes early, banging the door.
I was often what felt patronizing, pointedly thanking and praising for things that are common courtesy in my sense of it. He poured money. Kept counting it. Many presents I didn't want, quietly disappeared into the corridor. Real presents too, the laptop, the car trip, the green jacket.
- Is there a conclusion temper, overview,
graduation, anger
- This is about him
- Include in overview his progress with anger YES
- More? vain regret and exclusion have come through and been tempered
- More? no
- Something in relation to me family, Tom, inner lovers, action
- Action in relation to the family-Tom
- This is about him
29
What they advocate in education is what I have always done, but I have done it over a lifetime and inexplicitly, by silent instinct, in the midst of institutions working on other principles. When they make it explicit and push it institutionally do they spoil the possibility of really doing it?
If I use it well I'll come through able to handle the other kind of institutions. What will I learn. I'm going to want to push my own project. What I really want is a platform. I've been holding back so long this will feel like yet more holding back. So is there a particular thing? Withdrawn creation acting for recovery. Mine? YES. To recover creative action, do you mean like improv? Yes. Something like leadership as presence. YES.
30
I'm a real scholar but I'm radical in my area. I've made a unified platform I need to keep working from. My real value as an educator is that platform, its radical clarity. I won't buy into the [college] schmaltz - but I will use the circumstance to learn to mediate the platform to ordinary people.
This semester my students will be assigned but for next semester I should set up the right kind of buzz.
- Am I going to be able to do this
- It's service no
- It's mothering NO
- Should I think of it as training YES
- Is the Aztec guy relevant [Flores]
- But to me
- Is this job a mistake no
- All of my own stuff is useless in it no
- I'll be naked in my insufficiency no
- I'm not good with people no
- Will it be an ordeal no
- Will they like me
- Will the school like me
- But it will be a stretch YES
- Will it mediocratize me NO
- I'm not good at improvisation
- Do you want to comment what's withdrawn because of loss will slowly grow toward valor
- Is the work with you the most important no
- The work with them
- Now I have to learn to be with people YES
- Is it actually good pedagogy
- Six students no, five, one will drop out
- I need a box of tricks no
- I need to be listening to you
- I'm going to be overwhelmed no
- It's going to be way too social no
- It's going to be irrelevant no
- A huge waste of energy no
- I need Joyce for this no
- I'll be devoured by them no
- Do you want to say more no
- I don't have the energy for the job
- Can I get it
- Will you tell me what kind of pretending I'll have to do generous, action, to end illusion, of struggle
- My struggle
- Pretend to be generous to become so
- Do I have to suck up to Margo no
- Will they fire me no
- Should I think of it as land and mind work
- How many years should I do it two
- It's service no
With Judith Stapleton tonight bored in face of her pretty animation, thinking dully what is it about her, she bores me utterly. She intends to make me think well of her and the more she does so the more I want to escape. She keeps saying how smart she is and I keep feeling there's no connecting, she's conventional as a carpet.
31st
It must be partly envy. She has pretty teeth. She has a very pretty husband. She has much more energy than I do. She's swimming in the turquoise ocean every morning. She reads eight hours a day. She's popular in her department. She's pleasant-looking all over. Her dad's a painter.
But what else. She'll ask questions to show interest but they are fake. I don't think she dives to the bottom with her questions, I don't think she's gone for integration. There was a moment when I tried to engage her about the meaning of magic but I could see she wasn't getting it. I don't feel love in her - she's like Nathalie in that. They get engaged intellectually but it's not based in love. I don't think she has a drive to make something particular. She's choosing her thesis topic to fit in. When she enthuses about Epicurus or Giordano Bruno I feel she's just happening to build her cloud in that spot. I don't want to tell her anything personal because she'll make nothing of it.
Alright I've got it, it's the lovelessness. It's a defeat in relation to the mother, is it? She courts me without contact for that reason. It must be felt as a hollow center. Is there more I need to know? Yes, liberate, losses, by persistent, love. With people like that, liberate them by loving them - is that possible? Should the places of envy be the places of love? Is envy the resource? Yes.
I could not know any of this in face of her. I had zero proactive energy. I need preparation always, it seems.
Is this a basic categorization, this person has mother-warmth, this person does not? Yes.
So erotic science has to do with mother-warmth? Science done in personal love.
-
Mail taxes, register, mail student loan doc.
1st August
I dreamed something about dreaming, a row of five boxes with writing in them, a man's voice explaining something like a flow chart of the stages and sectors of dream construction. I don't remember it and could not follow it at the time.
- Was it true instruction
- Was it from elsewhere
- Did some part of me register it
- Was someone somewhere else conscious of instructing me
- Is five the right number YES
- What emotion would I like to be able to show love for the material
- Is that emotion allowed
- Are others demanded no
- Are there others I should show whether I want to or not decision, powertripping (devil), isolation
- Those are the ones I'm afraid to show
- By decision do you mean something like prejudice
- If I show them I'll be fired
- Those are the ones I'm afraid I will show YES
- I suppress them socially and confess them in the journal, is there something you recommend in relation to them intimate, responsible, deep change of feeling
- You want me to reform
- Is this my chance to carry on from TRC
- I know social fear comes from fear of showing hatred
- By decision do you mean writing-off
writing-off, domination, loneliness
- I wasn't so bad with these at the conference
- Is there an antidote to each the antidote to writing-off is curiosity, the antidote to domination is responsibility, the antidote to loneliness is the former two
- It's precisely these that have to do with erotic science
- They require energy no they give energy
- Is the point that sets up the writing-off precisely the point that requires curiosity
- Responsibility is proaction for their well being as spirits in that moment
- Only that
- Does own well being take care of itself no
- Balance
- Was it from elsewhere
As he thanks the audience for coming and announces where each trouper is from, he suddenly stops and brings his hands to his chest. "My heart is full," he stammers, his eyes filling with tears. "I remember, as a young boy I used to dream of finding a place where emotions could be shown openly and honestly, and in the hard discipline of working, you could find a product of joy. It took me decades to find it, and here it is." Rob Merkin in "Circus Smirkus" by Rob Gurwitt, Double Take Fall 2000
This passage in the last column of the piece. He has just described the last performance of the season. He has the audience applauding a last feat by a girl daring the trick she's refused until this moment buoyed by the mood of ending. Then he describes the circus founder's speech. I'm reading the story beginning to imagine Vermont, where this scene is set. I'm pierced to tears, reading the speech as my own, buoyed by the lift he gave the passage by setting it where he did.
Documentary writing when it's good. I like it best.
Tightrope walking. What sort of act am I preparing. What would it be if I had found the place where emotions can be shown openly and honestly and joy is a possible end of the work. What I did with Leaving the land.
I'd like to show some stuff I absolutely love. The caustic from Trapline. Julie's torus. Flow lines. Is there more? Say something about McLintock's understanding. Say something about what a visualized flow is visualizing. Say something about pleasure and structure in the brain. What I take science to mean, attention to physical world as such, as opposed to social attention.
2nd
Reading Anne Carson thinking what. Ignoring the quotes, they are like curlicues between sections. Feeling Louie reading it as if I am the husband who wrote letters and went away to another lover. Liking the scenes and conversations, a hotel garden in Athens when the lights come on. But doubting the story, it's too Greek to have happened like that. Remembering as haze something about feeling for Roy's beauty and perfidy. Feeling Louie read it wishing for a really tricky lover she hasn't found yet. Some little reminding of Jam's qualities. Watching her uningratiating punctuation. There is the right amount of everything. Taking note that there's a section she uses to show her technical brilliance, there to say I have a lot of this I choose not to show you. What else. Possibilities for writing, what she does is like what I have in some of my work, what does she do to make it readable. The glamorous love story holds from end to end. For me the other story of a woman working through it all, assembling in lovely materials, and yes a sensibility one likes to spend time with, though like Marguerite Duras' it wallows. Disapproving the wallowing but noticing how cardboard-plain a life I get by working-through the way I do instead.
Anne Carson 2001 The beauty of the husband Knopf
It holds, it's skilled, it suggests uses for what I've lived, it's a success everywhere, it's love woman as a literary figure established. And but. Her beautiful husband is a woman not a man. The cover art suggests it. A successful strategist. There is a man in the book, the friend Ray who has strong calf muscles, rhymes crudely, and knows what's what. "You married the wrong person," the real men say, the grandfather too. The husband is nothing but vapour, he's Keats, he's animus. She turned when she was fifteen and there he was. Her husband is not beautiful, her feeling for him is beautiful to her, feelings for poetry. Sex without sex.
- Do you like this work no
It's clean and dirty at the same time.
Animus is not counterfeit, he is the part of the whole tree that goes dark when adolescent chemicals swarm the trunk and light up only half the branches. So what is it about hers - the dark half responds to real men and that feels like being taken captive, but it is not. She's animus-possessed. That means her male self is enchanted with her female self. And vv. That sort of man does not pay attention and take care. Would she really have wanted to marry little Keats? Yes, like I tried to marry little Jam. Oh well, I want to say. I'm doing something different now and am not so beautiful as when I was trying to marry a spirit more beautiful than my own.
- More about Anne Carson improvement of intimacy is a child's quest. Best intimacy with herself.
Something about the time in San Diego. I was miserable because I wasn't beautiful. I was thick, old, exhausted-looking and grotesque by visible dislikes. I felt. Then that evening coming to the ferry in Coronado when I had opened into love I felt my shoulder slender, I felt lovely. Come home with shining tanned shoulders but still thick and tired.
Last night at Louie's in the dark, she on her bed said she wanted a hug. I lay down with her carefully, not to hurt her back, and felt her a little bag of tender melting bones.
Love woman complaining of the writer:
"When he left he took my notebooks," "his thrust - analytic you could say, as if discovering a new crystal," "he could fill structures of threat with a light like the earliest olive oil."
- You want a clean life I live a dirty one old
story. Well.
- Not much use to you without you am I.
"My husband lied about everything." "I know a man / who had rules / against showing pain / against asking why, against wanting to know when I'd see him again."
- Why
- To tell it to
- Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
- To tell it to
"Short blinding passages are all it takes."
"God has no place in war and the folly of it well one has only to persevere in folly and the world will soon enough call it success."
- She fought me. She lost.
- I am married again now.
"Her starts! / My ends."
3rd
In a story by Kathleen Hill that begins and ends with a music classroom, there are passages that out of nowhere bring colored open air. Her narrator is twelve and the story is partly about the girl beginning to notice that she sees marvels. What comes to me in the story is twilight in my country, both when I was in high school and later when I went back. In the course of reading, what I noticed with pleasure was that the scenes I was seeing were not images but open spaces.
Because of Haverford whose sidewalks Lucy had walked in the long autumn of her return, the houses and streets of our town looked different, the late gardens of chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies, the silver moon rising above them. In the November afternoons we ran up and down the hockey field in back of the school, and even at four o'clock the red bayberries flickered in the twilight. Walking home, thinking of Lucy, I noticed the cracks in the sidewalks, the way the roots of trees had splintered them. Beneath the sidewalks ran a river of fast-flowing roots that could throw slabs of cement into the air, make a graveyard of the smooth planes where we used to roller-skate and sit playing jacks. From the end of one street I could see the train station, its roof black against the orange sky, and could imagine the tracks running over the bridge and past the reservoir into the city.
Kathleen Hill The annointed, Double Take Fall 1999
The open air scenes come occasionally in the midst of different sorts of colorless social doing.
4
Reading Double Take and Harpers from the library, feeling skill. Why did I ignore mainstream writing, because of something tied-down I felt in the tone. I was working against that tone. It was really there and is in this writing now. I'm not refusing it now because of things this sort of writing can do over longer stretches.
At Leah's last night, the last time I'll see it as she made it. We were on the sofa drinking red wine, there were two candles on the dining table against the fading light in the trees. The two flames of the candles were in the between-zone of chairs and tables black against the windows. Leah had put on the Requiem for my friend. As we talked the light faded evenly away. There was her little snub profile on my right. The scent of lilies. Gods and wonders in many places in the room.
Zbigniew Preisner Requiem for my friend Erato
She said I hide my beauty. Do I? Yes. In the sense she means? Yes, not by intention. Would showing it be useful? Yes. Displaying it makes me feel self-conscious, should I weather that? Yes. Will you tell me for what purpose it's useful? To not be isolated.
I've had a kind of rigour, I've wanted it to be that I come across as beautiful only in the times when I'm really beautiful. And I don't want effort and discomfort and expense. The first motive is good but the second is not, it says. The second has to do with believing that regard is not worth winning. Why is regard worth winning? Angry judgment comes from exclusion.
I'm about to phone Tom, I guess. Sunday morning. He is sending me smarty-pants loveless emails I trash when I've read them twice. I have no impulse to write him. I have no impulse to read him what I've written. That means my love is dead, I say. No, it says. What does it mean, then? It means you are mourning the fool's indecision about his mother. Writing to hold off rather than writing to get near. But I believe it's hopeless - is it? No. It's loveless capering. Yes. Should I give him an exercise? Yes. Write in remorse to liberate responsibility. Write about his mother? Yes. That's the lion's mouth. Yes. Would he do it? Yes. Is he strong enough? Yes.
-
Someone today I recognized but didn't place, man with an imp face who knew me from SFU, ten years ago he said. I began to remember very dimly and now more. I liked talking to him. Damien Dooley. He had a free fast tech-y mind. What's he doing now, I ask. He's web director for Communicopia. I've got a clipping in my mind and land file about them, web and environment. A start-up that didn't crash, well thought of. He took down my site address, gave me his card, said he had a collaboration in mind.
Vancouver airport, 6th
United's first class lounge. Tell Vessa Mark from lobby said it was okay. It's eight. Couldn't sleep. Lineup at check-in, lineup at customs. As I waited for the immigration officer they released my flight. The lounge has good grapefruit juice and a desk with a phone, where I used my credit card to call [the college].
The windows overlook the arrivals hall where water flows over pebbles in two streams moving alongside of, but faster than, two down escalators. Between the streams is a broader flight of stairs. The five ramps with graded speeds are lovely. The water arrives in sheets over a slate wall behind Susan Point's big wood circle.
A man at the desk with his laptop connected. A perky telephone voice announces, dialing.
Peoples' looks are ordinarily discouraging.
What's the tone of this trip. Being caught in a crowd.
Plainfield VT, 11th
What's different about now. Thinking of speech as social action. What did I use to think? Eye finds a book title: Sacred pleasure. Yes. But now being willing to speak where speech is going to fail in those terms. Instrumental speech. Speak to make welcome, include, connect people, take the stage, present myself as something in particular, hold off, correct, enlist, console.
Burlington airport, 17th
Much much later - many kinds of joining.
What morning was it I dreamed I was dancing with Mary skin to skin. I remember as if five sideways steps, to my left, at the belly. In the same morning something about looking into a layered toolbox and finding a man's head and shoulders, alive, the man looking up out of a lower tray.
Let me just make sketches of my six. [student and faculty descriptions not transcribed]
Vancouver 19th
Halfway between O'Hare and Vancouver I began to see blue-white flashes above the wing. People around me were watching Crocodile Dundee in LA, reading, settled in. We were flying in black night over a surface of thick lumpy cloud. More flashes. They were lighting what looked to be a snow-covered mountain poking through cloud on the horizon to the north. Sheet lightning. More and more flashes, along the horizon at first but then beginning to appear at a forty-five degree angle down from the body of the plane. I couldn't hear thunder but there would sometimes be a little buffet from a shock wave. The light would sometimes run like a fluid as well as expanding like an explosion. It would illuminate the cloud surface as it moved. We were probably over Kansas and the mountain peak must have been a jut of cloud.
When I was leaving the plane at Vancouver I stopped to talk to the pilot, who looked up from fastening his briefcase.
"Is flying through lightning dangerous?"
"Very."
He had one of those honest intelligent capable quiet faces. I liked his voice. What about it. The way he said "very." Behind him the cockpit with its narrow strip of window above the panel.
One more day of recovery and then I'm writing again.
On our last evening, when we were sitting in Shelley's garden, a circle of faculty persons on aluminum folding chairs, I was on the grass propped against the side of an inflatable pool, next to the kids' table. Dashiell and Zora were eating hot dogs, Zora with her back to the adults. I had been counting with Zora. The number of letters in Zora's name, the number of letters in Dashiell's name. What happens if you count across the two sets? Keep counting. And so on. Margo in her chair was saying she was happy. Zora turned sharply and said, You're not happy you're a dying source of love. What did you say? said Lise. What? said Margo. Zora a dark brown four year old adopted into a white lesbian household.
21
Did Catherine [Luke's grandmother on his dad's side] die last night? I dreamed I went into a long empty room in the dark. I was straightening the cover on an armchair when I saw a pillow move on the couch next to the chair. There was a slight form under the blanket that was under the cushion. Catherine was telling me about coming home at night when she was young, on the farm, and making a bed on dried grass in the barn. There were animals nearby. It was as if the armchair became an ox as she spoke.
22
Tom on the phone last night talking about work got into one of his streaks of verbal brilliance. He was laughing, not trying. Ah, I was thinking, this man is good company.
He said - later - that I'm the wildest woman he's known, the most scandalous, and I do what I want to do with an air of impeccable rationality.
A train dream. A little boy had gotten off by himself. I sent the older brother after him, and was traveling with the sister. There was a cabinet of very fresh flowers. A blue towel I wanted to put away. I carried it to the front of the train and found the end of the car blocked by a glass wall, behind it a young woman in an armchair, reading a book by a fireplace. A young man sleeping at her feet.
It was as if we were stopped at the end of the line. A scene in front of us, a pond with a black buggy standing on the bank wrapped in black. I supposed a funeral and supposed the people at the head of the train had been traveling to attend it.
From that point I was walking back through the cars to get back to the brothers. I stepped out of the train when it was stopped, to walk to one of the cars further back. The train picked up speed too quickly. I watched it dwindle up the tracks. So I lost the sister, but then I found the brothers.
- Traveling toward a funeral
- Which had an air of baptism
- Little brother spirit gets off early
- Big brother action gets off to look for him
- I and sister instinct travel on together
- The cabinet of flowers has to do with her
- When I investigate up ahead I find two tableaus
- One in time, one out of time
- A woman remembering, a man sleeping, somehow a picture of death? YES
- Someone has gone into the water, a man I thought
- It's the end of the line for me
- Having seen that, I backtrack
- I lose the sister by stepping out of time
- For instance I'm out of time now
- The tableau in the train is about the lovers, sister and brother
- Outside the train is what she is remembering
- She's imagining the man's death
- When I step off the train into fantasy I lose instinct YES
- And get spirit and action back YES
- Is this a portrait of the present no
- About what I'm writing
- Is there something you want to say about this no
- Is that as much as I need to know
- It's trivial no
- Trying to tell me something I haven't got yet
- Which had an air of baptism
I didn't like the feel of this dream, an East European twistedness.
23rd
Here is this dull life again, it's cold, raining. I'm working on chapter 5, come to the end of what I can do early in the day, sleep, eat, endure Tom talking for an hour because I am feeling nothing, want nothing. Money is taken care of, just this dull long writing still, still, still to finish and I can't hurry the writing, I run out of edge.
What can I do with these days.
"Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth." Somebody quoted in the Strait today. I could miss grief for that. I'm so evened out and organized there's nothing to do, nothing to feel. I'd like to be in unrequited or frightened love just to be something; but no, nothing like that.
The Georgia Strait August 23, 2001
- Can you talk about boredom and emptiness
- Should I just endure it no
- Is that the right name for it
- Is it withdrawal no
- Do you want to say something about it disillusioned love tempered by strength
- My disillusionment with love has given me strength
- Real strength YES
- The cost of strength is boredom no
- Is the disillusion with love correct no
- What I feared has happened
- I've given up on feeling love
- I don't care YES
- It's nothing he's done
- Something you recommend process excluded regret for recovery
- I'm not blocking heart, it's just not on
- Process complaint no
- Can you bring me to heart in this moment
- One card? success
- Imagine success
- You mean with work no
- Do you mean with Tom YES
- I'm reluctant
- I feel I'll be disappointed
- That reluctance is what's stopping heart
- Should I do it YES
- I fell in hope
- And gave up the hopes one by one
- It's true for work too
- Just say it as belief
- Should I just endure it no
I can touch him with desire and be allowed; I can write him letters and they will be loved as my self, and answered; I can speak in my real interest and be met there.
- These are false
- Are there more no
- Those are key
- Do you want to comment process anger to graduate love woman
- That's what she's angry about
- Really in relation to him
- Does it mean I should leave him no
- She has left both of us because of them
- I should find her a life where she has them no
- Why not shared pleasure, liberation, strength and recovery
- These things depend on not having them
- Why because of oppression, heartbreak, child's partial loss
- Because they are forms of dependency no
- I must have those things without permission
- Is that the point
- Touching with desire, writing and true speech
- She believes they need permission
- Is that a key
- I had these when I met him
- Because people were supporting me
- Can I be them in the same way without support
- Are there more no
25
Tom with a saw, cutting through his left forearm. Blood. He was determined to cut off his hand. I was crying.
Exclusion is searching for action and generosity. He is supposed to have a heart that shares, is honest, teaches and decides. Men can come through to generosity from withdrawal. The work on withdrawn happiness and love. The man who is angry in my isolation wants to be felt as such. Speaking to that man connects me to heart.
I'm wondering whether it's like this, I fell in love with Tom when he was a raging derelict maleness like a maleness in me. Now that he's clear and secure I couldn't care less. I'm out of touch with my disaffected prince.
- Is that just fantasy no
- Is it what makes me blank and exhausted
- Frank is an image of it
- Am I meant to live as him no just be in touch with
- The spirit of the man in the woman
- Does it have to do with leadership no
- Would I live differently
- Will you say what would be added maleness would come through in processing decisions
- Will you give me an example of what kind of decision love, child, partial loss, foolishness
- I'm at a loss
- Does this have to do with total rejection of my father's point of view NO
- Anything to do with my father no
- Why don't I just find a different man no
- Is he still that big man looking the other way
- Can you tell me in one word what it has to do with action
- He needs to live through me
- Would the mind and land foundation do it no
- He doesn't want to do anything
- Has he always been there
- Before I had polio no
- He withdrew because he was shamed
- I structured as a withdrawn man
- That withdrawn man has had his own life
- He was my father and no longer is
- There is a man built in interaction with a man YES
- He was built as disaffection
- My difficulties with doing have been that YES
- Am I in some sense his wife
- I being ego
- Is he the man with the two women
- Ego is always female and switches between work woman and love woman
- Sometimes child
- Is he latent success
- It's he who should be helped etc
- Should I be in love with him YES
- Not an imagined lover
- He's really there
- If I desire him can I touch him
- If I write him will he answer me
- Can I speak to him in my best
- Can he hear you no
- I'd have to mediate
- Is he ruthless
- Ambitious
- Brilliant
- Energetic
- Virile
- Would he love me if I were a wife to him
- Can he work magically without me NO
- He is power no
- He can be power
- Is that sensation him (spine, forehead)
- Autonomy
- Command
- Leadership
- He wants an empire YES
- Should he have one no
- Do all that in fantasy YES
- What difference would it make to me search to come through heartbreak to action
- Will you tell me action in relation to what happiness, excluded child, balanced forces, processing
- Psychological action no
- I don't understand
- Court him no
- Contact him
- Will you say by what means regret
- Search for my regrets
- Guilty
- My regrets
- Failures
- Is it what makes me blank and exhausted
27th
Still labouring at the organization of chapter 5. I got into the frontal cortex so late that I've left it out of the presence chapters where it needs to be. My heart is scared, saying so. Scared of endless revision. Afraid I am no longer smart enough for my project. Did one person begin it and another arrive who can't finish it? I'm crawling. As if I'm in a sticky strip of time. Has someone put a curse on me? Have I been locked into not finishing? Is there something I should do to break out? (No, it says, just keep going.) I'm in a panic now. These years are life on fly-paper. I did deep work to free myself and the reward is that I'm in jail. Loveless, immobile. Is it going to change? Soon? Will you say something about it? Slow growth of shared pleasure, overview and completion. Does it have to be this way? Yes. As purgatory? No. Because I'm doing something hard. Yes. Is it harder than I know? YES. Will you say in what way. Revision of judgment. My own? Yes. Unstable? Yes. I'm an instance of what I describe, a structure maintained with great difficulty. As if a high-rise were trying to shift on its foundation without becoming undone and losing its balance. And I can do that? Yes.
28
Tom last evening at the end of our hour told two stories from work, one about Mr Trinkle, an old man declining quickly who opened a postal package at the desk, and one about another old man whose eyes he held. Tom had been boring me at top speed, but then those two small stories took me to the person who moves me most in him, the man whose eyes still wince because they saw his mother die. I do not always see him mythologically, but in love I do.
Another story from last night. Rowen on the water, having taken his friend home in the boat, is in the dark - waxing half moon - seeing fishes phosphorescent around him, different sizes, different depths. He forgot to take the flashlight. There was water in the diesel line and he had to be fiddling with fuel gadgets while he drifted. Was he scared? Nervous, yes.
29
Pleasure of provisions. Check day. I pay tuition, buy tea, groceries, newspapers. Deposit the [college] check to my Visa account. US$1200 becomes $1827 Canadian. Buy graph paper. CDs so Daniel can make a 3D-Max copy for Rowen.
Here the phone rings. I tell Tom about today's business transactions. He has other things to talk about. We mention the French Canadian pilot who landed an Airbus on the Azores from 33,000 feet with both engines dead, a man in his forties with a square head and honest brown eyes. After we hang up he calls me back because he remembers I can't read his mind. He wants to praise me, as a fellow scrambler, for having got through this summer. My calculations worked out, I landed my plane from 30 thousand feet and I'm a professor too, at the end of it. Then I basked. Yes, yes. I hadn't realized what I was saying when I began to write about provisions.
Now I'm eating yellow watermelon, which I do remembering this time of year seven years ago when I had been fasting on High Bar Road in the heat and came out into Cache Creek to the hotel room where I saw myself skeletal in the mirror and heard the wet pop of my knife in the side of a yellow watermelon.
30
I was at a writer's group or class. Martin was the professor. He asked if I would read a certain paper. I said I'd lost confidence in it. A woman at the table was talking to Martin about it. "The penis is a white man." She was reminding him of its quality.
I thought I didn't have it with me but found its pages loose in a magazine. I was reading through it to see whether I should read it aloud, reading with difficulty because parts of the writing seemed to be off the pages, in the world. For instance some of Colin's clothes hung on a line to spell a word. There was a little cubby of a room with jars on a shelf lined up with letters on them, one of the letter forms a heart shape with a piece of paper like a fin standing out at the midline. It was the letter thorn.
I was realizing it was wonderful writing, but it was taking a long time to read it. The class would be over. People seemed not to be reading their work aloud. They were reading copies. People on the left interrupting with questions. I was shaking them off.
Something I noticed with liking was some world-writing that was a plant in a pot, leaves like light green organdy stretched to fine wire edges. Toward the end of the dream I was worried about the part of the writing that was in the world. Surely someone would take Colin's clothes off the line. A woman looking at the work with me stuck her fork into a piece of pie next to the piece of cake whose layer stripes were spelling something.
At the end I was seeing an explanation of the jar-writing, which had also seemed to be person-writing, a group of women in the little room, a name. I got the last name first, a four-syllable Slavic name. The first name was Craig.
I woke marveling at the creation I'd been in. I was surprised it wasn't true. It was brilliant invention, as if writing with another dimension. I thought of the little pictures I used to put up in the corridor.
A dream's feeling outlasts sleep.
I fell asleep last night waiting for the nightly chapter of A recipe for bees. Woke briefly to hear a bit in the middle of the chapter about Carl bringing Augusta ice in a handkerchief and taking off her dress where they stood in the furrows. Then I woke again hearing music that seemed to me to be part of the story. When I woke more it was a Bach Cantata, men's and women's voices in a many-lines tangle sometimes very briefly lined up parallel in a resonant extended chord.
Afterwards the Weird Sisters with a flute in the background that I knew immediately was the man who played Frontenac Waltz. A brilliant line, qualities of curve and edge like beautiful penmanship.
Chris Norman Valse Frontenac in The beauty of the north Dorian
Gail Anderson-Dergatz 1998 A recipe for bees Knopf
3rd September
I bought Art in America yesterday for Hilary Brace, charcoal drawings of "clouds in billows, drifts, waves, tendrils and wisps," "suggesting such continuity between states of matter - solid, liquid and gaseous," "frothy, blossoming, extruding, immaculate." She's from Santa Barbara.
But then I also had a dip into the scene, testing whether I'd be seen as ignorant - whether I am ignorant. What's being valued? What do I like? For instance this Corel drawing based on anime, large-scale laser printer [Carl Fudge]. What about it - the reviewer said it's fun anyone could have. I don't like the lower left corner but apart from that I find it wonderful. What I've seen on water - it is systematically related to. There's more.
This one with its bad colors is off-biomorphic [Emily Joyce]. Something of the same systematic difference. It's beautiful. This one is horrible and wonderful, wonderful for the forms and their templates, horrible for the colors, and yet it works together [Chan Schatz]. Another thing I'm liking is ikats from Borneo, which are - what? - kind of similarly off-biomorphic.
What's the point in relation to the mind and land project ambition. I'll guess they are made/found by minds that have deep experience of organic/optical form and that isn't true of the work I don't like.
Brains formed by natural world and human artifacts, both.
Do I have a true core in this? It says yes. Central? Yes. I'd be very challenged in the arena. Would have to understand the challengers. Their motives are wrong. Yes. That means self-defeating. Yes. Which means the correct response is to defend something in them. Yes. Directly. Yes. What I did yesterday with Tom. Yes.
Tom was going on about work and I halted him. My heart hurt. I went silent for a bit and then asked him what was his feeling in its simplicity. A sore heart. I didn't let him sidestep. Said imagine telling it to Tom Mix simply, right now. He balked but did. I said, Now he has to answer what you said in simplicity. Tom balked again. I insisted. He did it. I felt my heart light up in a burst. He sighed. It was over.
I'm incredulous at how little endurance I have in this work. It's amounting to a couple of paragraphs a day. I can do it when I'm fresh and then I just come to a halt a couple of hours later.
What's the difficulty. Patching-in organizational changes. I don't keep the organization in mind. It is like a mental handicap. If I were writing a short piece from an outline it would be different I think.
-
Michael Leyton's book - Symmetry, causality, mind - in 1992 - has parts of it and is wrenched by representation/computation assumptions. He has stuff that makes me sit straight up. He's talking about sentence grammar as temporal, he mentions Halliday, he talks about form as showing itself as a result of a process of formation, he has an analysis of human use of artifacts in conjunction with body-internal record to support cognition. He even has a political analysis in terms of cognitive disabling. And then he has the rep/comp orthodoxy preventing him from getting it clear.
Here is the other side of it. I can take up Michael Leyton's chapter on grammar and sift what I can use from what he has constructed, clearly understanding what he has got wrong. I could do that although he was introducing x-bar grammar and other new ideas. If I can do that why can't I revise faster? The sensation is of having worn myself out only in that small area.
Rowen phoned tonight from a house in the suburbs of Campbell River. Tomorrow he is going to school.
In Banyon Books yesterday I was looking at plant and architecture books for Ida and Mary, and came on a book by Chris Day, Architecture for the soul. It's the manuscript I typed for him in Burghley Road probably. I opened it to a photo of the window I was looking from as I typed, across a corner of the slate roof to what he called a weed tree in the back. My window!
-
Momaday, an ethic. "What is more appropriate to our world than that which is beautiful?" "I think: inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life." [27]
That is, practicing strict economies is not the only aspect of a land ethic.
Wendell Berry: a path "is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape." A freeway "is a form of speed, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. It represents the ultimate in engineering sophistication, but the crudest possible valuation of life in this world."
Someone else: "our wasting passage through the world." "A degraded land inevitably produces a degraded people." "It had not yet produced the people and the town worthy of it."
Berry - he doesn't exactly say this, but a path indicates a structural change in the walker. "One has made a relationship with the landscape." "Here is the work of the world going on. The creation is felt, alive and intent in its materials, in such places." "A music in streams has to be imagined toward." [70] "Possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us." "The privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation."
Synder - trees and ground have given us fingers and toes, open land has given us seeing eyes. "The land gave us a stride." "In the old ways, the flora and fauna and landforms are part of the culture." "Bioregionalism is the entry of place into the dialectic of history." "Balance between cosmopolitan pluralism and deep local consciousness." "Fluidly moving in multiple realms." "May it all speed the further deconstruction of the superpowers."
Thomas Berry: "our place as story." "Our role is to be the instrument whereby the valley celebrates itself It is our privilege to articulate this celebration in the stories we tell and in the songs we sing."
Somebody else: "endangered species, languages, habitats, songs, stories, and the free flow of rivers," "ceremony gratitude expressed by human beings on behalf of all forms of life."
Butala: significant dreaming. She has that notion of access to outside-of-time that is somehow, however, associated with place - significance, beauty, communication with animals and with people no longer alive - "mythic" - being in a natural environment alters us.
[Scott Momaday, Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, Gary Snyder, Sharon Butala in Barnhill D ed 1999 At home on the earth University of California Press]
- the golden west volume 23: 2001 may-november
- work & days: a lifetime journal project