| in america 1 part 2 - 2002 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 September 2002 I am struggling for a version of what really happened in the seven-year story of Tom. It is as if there are parallel lines of true story. In one a predatory man who has driven his luck farther than it will reach catches sight of a lame woman who will have a vulnerability he can use. He succeeds in capturing her, lies to her, says anything he thinks she will want to hear. There are many inconsistencies but he finesses them. She is kept near enough to hope so she continues as long as he needs her. When he is in the clear he stops making an effort and has no more time for her. He dumps her. This story is a story of ruthless betrayal. In another story that woman is working carefully among the inconsistencies of his story and her own, and is made able to guide them both in a slow process of deeper rescue than the man had had in mind. This story is a story of spiritual bravery.
- "It contains between its lines the meaning of my life," Ed [Dalpe] writes. I was in Wired Café after a day traveling again to look at stone, unsuccessful in finding a bike, unsuccessful with computers, driving Nora's velvet machine, that large bourgeois enclosure. His letter made me cry even the second time I read it. "The poetics suggest something about my nature, that when I am in repose I grasp the thrust of life, and whether I want to or not my existence is all about being in the world, just as the sun is personified through me." Why am I crying for Ed, that smashed darling so full of love and inquiry. I'm crying because I sometimes thought I would not be able to do anything with him. - A big bird, very blue, with a white throat and belly and a black-barred eye. It was raucous jumping in the white branches of the ficus. Then there were two of them, and at the same time a ruby-throated hummingbird came and looked at me. Scrub jay. I drank tea in the evening and read through student piles listening to Karina Gauvin over and over until midnight. When I woke at 4 I wandered around looking over the balcony edge thinking about the terrace, and then sat in the light reading the rest of Joan and Sharon, then went back to sleep until 9. I am telling this in pleasure at the freedom I have in a house with no downstairs neighbour, away from the supernal mental demands of the thesis. Exultate, jubilate Karina Gauvin soprano, CBC Radio Orchestra conducted by Bernard Labadie, CBC Records 2001 - Mozart, Schubert, Haydn 19 At the sill of Thursday. 20 There is sand in my bed. I stood yesterday afternoon looking at the waves. The day was sunless and the air powdery. The waves were celadon green and white, minimal. There is always the instant one waits for, when they lift to stretched translucence before they break. The instant is always gone as soon as it arrives. Earlier, as I sat back from the waterline, I was watching a woman standing near it. I saw her yesterday sitting on the steps behind Starbucks. I noticed her then because she was wearing socks, capri pants, thigh length cotton jacket and a Dr Seuss sock hat all the same color, faded moss green. The socks were in a very light fabric like silk and she was wearing them with flip-flops so they seemed to have a big toe division like the silk socks of Buddhist nuns. There was a bracelet tattoo around her ankle. She was young but weathered, possibly homeless, possibly schizophrenic. Yesterday she was standing looking at the waves and then began to write a word with the side of her foot. She wrote with her right foot from left to right. Then she wrote another word under the first. When she was turning to leave she smiled what seemed to be a drugged or crazy smile and walked away across the sand speaking to herself. What she had written was
- I was at the computer this morning, had written the first paragraph to Elissa, addressed her as kestrel, spoken about her wit at the res. I was going to go on to say her swiftness made me understand why she gives herself a hawk's name for her email. I looked up from the keyboard and found myself staring at a large brown bird standing in the top bowl of the German neighbour's fancy fountain. Was it a hawk or a quail? I couldn't see a topknot. I moved carefully from window to window but still could not tell. Went outside and came at it from behind the tree fern trunk. It opened its beak and said eeek, eeek, then stretched out its wings and tail. A hawk. I was dumbfounded. Did I call it? It says yes. I could never do it intentionally. It has to be a sort of indirection. At the res, the way all three of the women fell into acute attention when I told the story of the hawks at my home site when I camped there. 21 Overjoyed this morning. I woke late, drove to PB to find the farmers' market, parked illegally in a motel lot in the alley near it, bought real carrots, courgettes, strawberries, melon, radishes, a thai basil plant, my first own plant here. Amid this provisioning I saw bikes being put out beside the PB Surf Shop. Found a bike. He said $65, I said that was good and would he consider $50. He said yes. I got back to my car in time to see the notice to tow on the windshield but before the towtruck. The lot watcher was on the second floor balcony with his cell phone in his hand. I whisked away singing Oh, she takes care of her self. That song has a line in it too that says, She's earned her degree (She's always / a woman / to me). Louie has stopped emailing, probably offended that I am not talking. I don't miss anyone. 22 Full moon and equinox. At seven Sunday morning many birds energetically squeaking. What is it about Le Guin. She's an anthropologist of Earth, working in great detail to see what we are and imagine how we might be different. She is vastly more intellectual than standard novelists and at the same time as sensorily developed as for instance Gordimer. The Telling is a parable of corporate culture / theism superimposed on pagan / taoist real world intelligence. In this book she also describes her own profession. "The maz were professionals. They gave the major part of their life to acquiring and sharing what they told, and made their living by doing so." There I notice a white hair against the page and lift it, try to lift it, aside. I haven't described the experience, so many times in these years, of seeing here and there, many places in my old house, long single hairs, more translucent than white, taking in light like optical fiber. It's the moment when the sun slants into the room from the east. The birds are down to a few chirps. There is the very pleasant small burble of the fountain. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertilizer's pharmacopoeia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. We're not outside the world, Yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened in it? We're here, and we have to learn how to be here, how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need to go ... all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don't tell the world, we don't know the world. We are lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take care and tell it truly. ... people to whom the highest spiritual attainment was to speak the world truly. the sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully XLNC is the name of the Tijuana classical station. the dark dazzling blue of the sky They went very soft and silent among the unbalanced giants. 23 Meeting with the engineer at Nora's office this aft. Gabriele tomorrow. White mist amid the trees. Jody, Logan, Steven again. Go to the library for Jody's reading list. 23rd Tom was at the desk in the Golden West wearing a blue shirt rather than a white. He had started a moustache and looked beaten down and forlorn. Nor lent me her beautiful G3 Powerbook and gave me a phone, green. At Mission Hills Nursery I ate figs off a street tree and bought a Chilean mesquite, a white salvia, a Bergaarden, a discolor, and a scented geranium. They are for the pots I found yesterday in the alley. 26 Gabriele is pretty. My manner with her is helped by her brown eyes and shapely sexy mouth. We had our meeting at the Café Roma. She has her gracious ways, which bore me, but if I get to the point we are immediately a team, strategizing. I say I need a site map and some knowledge of financial structure possible. She says she wants me involved in the core curriculum, probably in the third quarter. I say my priority is a sense of how early technology is, the breadth of the meaning of the term, and for the college, technology that is grounded. She also said that after she took my concept to the planning department they hired a landscape architect who gave them a plan he said would cost $30,000. She told them it cost too much and was not quite what she had in mind. I told her it would probably cost more than that. She said she knew. It was a good meeting, brisk, focused, highly equal. 27 Woke at 4:30 and sat in my bed writing Steve on the Powerbook, white type on a screen blue-black like a night sky. Yesterday, maybe because Louie phoned in the morning and scolded me, I began to be off balance, some, a little hungry and unnoticing, scanning miserably for a man. I have been so jubilant and autonomous it didn't seem worth it to have had someone to tell my stories. They do not seem to need telling the way they did. I don't know whether that is resignation. Eating pollock and vegetables sitting on the tile in what I think of as the hot space, the enclosed back patio. There is my mesquite, giving up on a number of its leaves, maybe because it was moved. The palm aligned with a power post making much of a small wind. I'm going to go do gardening for the afternoon. I like this rubber tree for its broad thickness at the upstairs window. Sunday 29th Nora loves David now. I know it from the way she says "He's a big boy" and the way she calls him David Garrity when she talks about him. I watch her with people admiring and scandalized. She's alert and lively continuously, responsive, agreeable. Her range is what scandalizes me - I'm not saying this meaning that I'm right. I take against people, she doesn't. She throws herself into the game, not obsequiously and willfully the way Louie does or did, but aggressively though lightly. She's successful with me so I'm taken aback to see her successful with people I write off at a glance. I am seeing Tom later so I will talk now about the sag I feel in relation to him when I think of him, which isn't often. I say, What happened? I don't understand what happened. For the last six months we were very happy. I was talking about secure attachment, then when I came down I discovered you weren't going to drive back up with me. You were thinking about the bicycle race with Oscar. You hadn't renewed your license. You hadn't dealt with your teeth. And you had turned nasty. You were broke after six months of exceptional checks. When I am going to be able to live near you, I find you solidified in a single life, very minimized, work, sleep, ride your bike, watch TV, buy CDs for entertainment. No energy for me, no getting ready. Alright that's the dreary litany and it is true too, but miserable. Here's another part: sometimes he would drop into balance and be my intelligent companion, my true man, it seemed. Sometimes I would drop into love and be a shining woman. Seven years he was drying out and I was drying up - is that true? He dried out into exhausted stability. I dried up into soulless accomplishment. I want the true man and the shining woman back. I like the accomplishment but I don't like the soullessness. For me soul is in sex. Soul is a chemical state. I'm getting mail addressed to Dr Ellie Epp. That is a ridiculous combination of words.
30th La Jolla to pick up Logan's envelope. A bookstore next to Panniken's with a wide shabby yard, some kinda local coffeehouse [DG Wills] at the end of a bike path. Tom and I sat for hours yesterday on a bench above north Pacific Beach. Hours of dazzling sea. Tom with a week's beard, bursting into shouts about work. He is no longer brown-nosing Tom Mix. I pat him approvingly for that. He no longer was in mind to be friends and was asking worriedly whether he has a chance. His idea of friends is, anyway, that he will write emails about rock'n'roll, using long words that make him hopeful that he can pull off seeming educated. Meantime I am depressedly feeling how I have given up this fight. Then I said I was depressed and asked if he had patience, because what I had to say was not very formed. I said what I feel, and he must not argue, was, there's no one, there's no one. He did not argue. I said it must be a memory. I was glad to have said it, and later more, about discouragement and hopelessness. He tried various tacks, energetically, talk about sex, which I stop him in, for instance. He is back in the saddle of his old task, running after a woman who may be gone. He listened carefully to what I had to say about my state. When his emails ignore me I mostly trash them. He was talking hard and a lot of it was whatever came to him in the moment. That's Tom's brain, he doesn't have a stable opinion. With the utmost curiosity and faith he learned all he could about Nora Bass ... He was lost in the details, he could find no exact focus towards her. His own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. Michael Ondaatje 1976 Coming through slaughter Norton Olson-Creeley correspondence notes: Above all things resist, to be sick at heart, we are forward, and it is such gratification, that you are ready to go with me. What prose must be: particle by particle, clean. growing from the nerves of [man] a feel for timing, a feel for sound ... the consciousness necessary [Charlie Parker] It's going to be somebody else's business to say, hear, eventually, what's been done. [prose] Sd look, each time, for the SINGLE intelligence making its way A novel is weeping for men: always. Losing the heart / while keeping the head ... The only way. For ways in speech, sounds and timing: there is nobody like, say the colored The cadence of his thot is long & intricate, & thus he must continue Charles Olson ed Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: the correspondence (various volumes) The Zanzibar, 2nd October On the street in PB. What's today. Wanting something. Staying away from two tasks, reading notes and thinking for Gabriele, various gardening for Nora. What do I want, accident, adventure, something off the rails, a deep fuck, really deep. Sigh. When I wake at night and can't sleep I think a young girl. I start with her brown legs. In the end, I don't know why, she has to be fucked by two strangers her friend/father instructs. Deep enough, this night, she became a mare, milked and fucked at the same time. He's looking out for her, containing her, she can let herself go, dissolve far. He tells her they need to touch her breasts because they are so beautiful. He wins her consent because she can feel how intelligently he is teaching her, he knows what she doesn't. What he's doing is for her, not for himself. He's making it possible for her to be honest, one step after another safely as more forbidden. Her beauty helps in this, because it brings them to her innocent in adoration. They are molten as she, but rational. They put their hands to either side of her fuzzed apricot and open its halves deliberately so she can feel it held open before they slip in and push. He praises how hot and slick she is, tells her she is a wonder. It is as though she and they too are in a truth and wonder drug. At that moment a young man on a skateboard, furry hard chest, nipples erect. Sad man in a flowered golf shirt staring after him. Land of girl bodies. It's a cord from clit to womb that aches. A yellow awning. A fan palm. Logan this morning was happy. He looked at his section on Galvin after what I said last night in a note and could tell he was clearer. He didn't know how I could know about him just from email. He had a moment inspired by his process paper. He hadda admit, it's okay to say it now, that sometimes he was furious. He could have had somebody else who would have let it be easy. He's thinking he might do an MA at UCLA. I said, You have to find a way to learn to follow through. Not caring about it doesn't matter, nobody cares in revisions, you have to be able to persist, back off when you blow up with exasperation, come at it again. There's always a crash. And me, I had to be patient with every wrong comma and jarred preposition he cannot see, can't see. I had to patiently correct it. I had to be straight-up nonmaternal when he blew like a baby. Say nothing good until he blew. I wrote about the relation of old soul and moron in him, that it's his edge but he has to be willing to be it. Ah blue sky. Bluer to the east, it's afternoon. Sea now. "A red-and-black seething of erotic rage ... great gaping pits with ragged lips, vaginas" - that's LG, 1969. Empathic and paraverbal forces at work ... powerful and confused, rising out of the perversion and frustration of sex, out of an insanity that distorts time, and out of total concentration and apprehension of immediate reality in the center of the darkness. Faxe: the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light. I would step out of the dark farmhouse where I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the stars, flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark. - Tom is writing and I don't like his writing. I did all the work I did, and he is writing as he wishes, and another kind of person would maybe like it, but I don't. He doesn't like mine either. We can't be lovers because we don't like each other's writing, because we are writers and don't like each other's writing. I can see that it's comical. It's a joke Joyce would like. Farfetching, intuitive perception of moral entirety, seeing wholes. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. 3rd Rereading Left hand of darkness aware sometimes that I am noticing different things than I noticed when I was thirty-two, was it, early on in 820A East Pender. I was interested in ambisexuality, bespeaking and sexual tension. Now what am I interested in - Le Guin herself, what I can pick up of what she is thinking about her own powers. She had a massive expansion in Dispossessed and Always coming home. The photo on this jacket, 1969, has her forty, proud, guarded, angry maybe, sitting back in a photographer's chair with right hand gripped tight on left wrist. In the more recent picture she is sixty, smiling, leaning forward, deeply and warmly confident, hands loosely clasped. Fine black hair gone fine silver hair, cut in the same neuter cap. Same full fish-mouth. Farfetching is what she does. The fact that she fell in love with her half brother and goes on writing from that love though she has been married to Charles Le Guin since she was twenty-two. She is Joyce's age and Joyce's kind. Only five years younger than my mother. In her stories incestuous lovers bear children. I'm sure she hasn't known what she was doing, always, but she has believed her sense of the whole. Looking at the Creeley-Olson correspondence seeing that though they were making and supporting something right, they were also posing and bluffing more than my lineage has done - in the order I used them, Montgomery, de Beauvoir, Lessing, Richardson, Le Guin, Gordimer, Woolf. Apart from de Beauvoir they are sensory philosophers. What I believe is that I have had to learn my resources by studying as instances women whose generations themselves learned, at first, from men, and then found themselves building in another way. Le Guin is my base as a philosopher. I'm seeing it more, now, than I have. In 1969 we weren't sure we could do what men could do. In 2002 we are sure we can do it better, but only if we do it our way. I'll take that as the meaning of Le Guin's relaxed shining eyes in the later picture. 4th Shining Friday morning. Shining more in this lovely room because the ficus that closed the south is down. Now the drifting ribbons of the pepper tree can fire up. I was wayward for some days and now have gotten to the gardening and canyon facts. My plants are luminous in their red clay pots. I am feeling surrounded by more and more, instead of the thinness there has been for years. 6th When I can't sleep I am imagining a man with warm black eyes, curiosity, money and a hard dick. As I do so I find myself thinking of Tom with liking, his realness. Sore eyes, sore teeth, cold sore, sniffles. Google brought word that Being about was shelved at SFU BF311 E65 2002. 7th Yesterday very draggy, sore eyes, drove downtown in the heat, found Tom shaved, still picking up his room. He told his adventure day, the bike race, cramping, sun, wind, Oscar and Susy, the Playas, his tape as they drove home in the evening, Cielo y Tierra with the Playas coming into view below, glittering. Cielo y Tierra 1996 Heaven and earth Elektra I lay on the bed and let him tell. Later - I was there until 9 - I said why I gave up on him last summer, the specifics, holding his hand as I said the worst. Talked about my students. I hadn't realized it but I was feeling better. I said his courting is a red herring at the moment, what needs to happen is about him and him. He said one night last week he saw shame as a child hiding his face, holding up his arm over his head, cringing. I said when he's saying unconditional respect, unconditional love, to me, I should take it that I am a mirror, he is needing to say it to himself. He agreed and at that point I saw another face, more quietly alive, more alive in the eyes. We had come to balance, both sighing. There is a thin fibrous sea-fog today drifting inland. At Bird Rock I saw flat water under the incandescent white air, gurgling at a narrow line of cobbles. Elissa writes three visionary experiences she had with yoga positions. Yes. There's the life of her. I said You're swift, and she was. Rowen in the part of the conversation that came after the conversation said he had invented a character in a role-playing game, a monkey called Geonat. He is a baby of a race evolutionarily prior to a race currently alive in the game world, found by human scientists frozen in the ice. Because he is so fast and strong iron devices are fastened to his legs. He escapes and is living wild. He is about three feet tall. He will develop powers in the time to come. Rowen's two paragraphs announcing the character were elegantly written. He likes a girl in his musical theatre class who he says is noble. A walk in the late afternoon, south two blocks and back on Bellevue. A woman came out of the house when she saw me looking at her pots of orchids. Five colors: pink-purple, egg yellow, orange, salmon, dark red. 8 Wendell Berry's book, 1988, presumably about himself and his Kentucky farm. His farmers are 80-acre farmers and not broke. They have literate university educations - I mean history and literature, not agriculture. His book ends with a vision of his own creek valley as heaven, singing with light. His writer/farmer has lost his right hand, by which he means something like his confidence in manly efficacy. It isn't a completely resolved book but it is a book to put next to Frank after his life. Frank's moral failures which kept him out of heaven. 10 Reading Remembering - bad title - close analysis of male crankiness - but it doesn't get to the bottom of it - shame, rage, loss - he makes it metaphoric, loss of right hand - but that means he doesn't have to get to it. What have men lost? Have all men lost it? It is as if what he describes as the consequences of the loss of his hand actually are the loss - loss of trust, confidence, felt connection, early love, the self-trust of bliss. The other metaphor, which is at the same time a fact and a consequence of male loss, is the degradation of agriculture. The book is somewhat confused because Berry shows his male protagonist as having had trust, confidence, connection and early love as an adult, and then losing them as an adult. He sets him in a place and community where those things are givens. That's nostalgic/sentimental. His ending is not false but it is also not understood. He returns to early love, which is community and heaven, but takes it as a vision of afterlife. 11 I am interested in the two next door. I have meetings with Sylvia where we look at one another very simply and plainly. She has a creased tanned honest face. I look at her asking What are you? and it is as if she is looking back in the same way. This afternoon I met her husband George, Jorge, I assume, older than her, a medical translator. He had a fine aquiline nose and silver eyes, presence that's in his language maybe. I locked onto him, wanted to know more. Had been thinking of them as Nazi and Old Grump but no, they are souls and are interestingly married. Saturday night. Sore from a whole afternoon working for Nor, moving the compost bin. Want an evening. Students for long hours this week, Sharon's magpie nests, Jody's smart sharp chomping-up of cognitive evolution, Elissa's tale of self and Self and somehow body. I've spent days writing her. Logan's finished product on its way to the registrar's office with typos I've corrected thrice still uncorrected. What do I want in the evening. Have Mozart, have golden light warming the room, actually warming it - all the lightbulbs. Read Jody's level 6 review at midnight last night before going to sleep and later in the night dreamed him - something about being touched by him. I was singing jazz, carried the way I can be in the midst of strong music. He was surprised. That says nothing about what the music was like - Read David McNeill on gesture and mind. McNeill David 1992 Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought University of Chicago 12 I was in a room with a gas fireplace of sorts. I saw there were two sources of blue flame, one smaller than the other. The smaller was maybe a reading light. It had been on all night. I turned it off. But the other flame was playing around other parts of the stove now, out of bounds. I turned it down but saw it creeping up the chimney again, floating thin and blue licking at the whole stove. I turned it off. I'm at UCSD and see a class starting to assemble. They may be going to project a film about the Churchlands. I find myself a seat in the second-last row. What happens then is a tableau. I gradually figure out that a dramatist was working with the class to understand economic theory. This tableau is illustrating a book or a time. The students have curled their long hair so there is an impression of curliness and dress-up. I am thinking what this might mean as an economic era. At some point someone at the front says there are people here who shouldn't be here. I'm assuming they mean I'm not in the class. Someone else says it's alright. There are more tableaus, or the first one unfolds. I notice I am getting more comfortable, sitting on the floor, moving closer as if the drama has spread into the audience. There are bigger vistas, scenes, one a skating scene on a rocky white channel between warehouses. A student is explaining that there is ice only because of air pollution. A lot of detail. Later we are moving along a walkway in a large room in what turns out to be an auction house. I reach over the rail and open a drawer in the top row of a file cabinet wall. I look at it with a man next to me. Chinese file cards maybe, because it's a small drawer with a well in it, like an ink well. From that point I am even freer, talking to people, slaloming down a white marble ramp. I'm looking at more and more objects - it is an auction room for yachts, I think, because there are many strange pieces of built-in furniture, molded pieces that might be shelf-benches or bunks, or might conceal rowboats. The auction house museum is closing. Should I stay behind? I find I have stayed behind, but then gradually there are more and more people. They all know how to get in at night. Throngs of them. Etc. This dream seemed very rich and wonderful when I woke, but writing it I see how it just wanders along developing from wherever it happens to be. I liked the feeling of physical freedom and close attention, interest, abundant invention. Writing dreams, because the feeling of detail is remembered but the detail isn't, I'm particularly aware that almost nothing of the actual dreaming is registered. "It is conceivable that a metanarrative perspective without strong narrative content is the form in which the left hemisphere apprehends, [stores], and reproduces visually presented narrations." That is McNeill 1992, 345 on commissurotomized speech and gesture. 13 Tom stopped in yesterday afternoon and I have been depressed since. He was here in his green kerchief and I was looking at him with my cold eye. The depression says, I'm not interested in anything. There is nothing I care about or want to do. I don't care about being here, I don't care about the canyon or UCSD, I don't care about and have absolutely no belief in the institute, I don't care about anyone, or want to be with anyone, except maybe Luke. I have no drive or intention. I don't care about my book. There is some confusion in this. The part of it that has to do with ambition is true in general but hasn't depressed me. It is just there as a condition I deal with by being interested in little this's and that's. Why I feel it when I have talked to Louie or yesterday after not loving Tom, is a clue I suppose. I've woken at 3:30 saying I want to love but I am shamed by loving Tom and don't want to do it. I didn't want Nora to see him. And yet, in earlier years, when he was no better than he is now, I was quite pleased to show him. That is the confusion. I want to have someone - it says it that way - but I want a chance at someone better. So why was Tom good enough then and not now? Etc. And if I am going to be ashamed of Tom, why am I not also ashamed of my car and of living as hired help in someone else's house? And of my neglected teeth and shabby agedness? Consciousness is very spotty in this area.
14 Yesterday Tom did not have the green kerchief over his head. We sat in his room and went to Mexico for Premarin. I sneaked looks at him and was familiarly lustful and outright flirtatious. I can feel it now as a buzz in the cunt. Oh well. Also did bookwork till he said enough. It is midday at the Zanzibar. Delicious French roast. A US border guard yesterday - thin creased smart face, playing with the humans presenting themselves in front of him, a beautiful spirit - light. Two weeks opening now, garden and canyon. Tom:
15 October These mornings are whited out, not fog but marine cloud low overhead. The sky opens around two in the afternoon. Until then there is a chill. Magisterial Willa Cather. Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers, agricultural land and mind. Below in what is now Nora's park the big ficus is lying cut into blocks of wood showing clear yellow at the cuts, clean wood in the wide light let into a much larger yard. The cleanness and evenness, smoothness of the wood is very striking. It's heavy, still alive. Much of the lawn is heaped with branches cut all in uniform lengths like stalks of a large vegetable. I stand there trying to see the weights and axes of the space. Where are the paths, where are the gates, where does the stucco wall begin. I'm right about the shape of the terrace, straight across, but I am not sure of the placement of the steps and whether there should be coves in the wall. A brugmansia in a big pot. A wall of salvia Waverley across, she thinks.
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