| in america 1 part 6 - 2003 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th February 2003 At David's [gay coffeehouse in Hillcrest] in the sun. Nine American flags hang from an electrical pipe running across the front of the building. A man and woman who had been sitting at the farthest table each speaking on a cellphone have got in a car together and gone to work. In the Union this morning there are stories about orangutan culture, heart disease and aspirin, Bush's address at a memorial for the Columbia astronauts, and evidence of Iraqi noncompliance. As I was eating my bagel a small dog sat quivering against my knee. A red Jeep Cherokee, an old one, boxy, with roof rails, a Limited. I walked across the road to the Rite Aid parking lot to look at it. It's high off the ground, has a tow bar and big boxy tires. There's a small white sign in the café window, Official Meeting Place of GLO Gay Leathermen Only. Sparrows nibbling seedy tops of short grass. Yesterday at Anderson's Nursery, mid-morning, between long rows of shrubs, there was a moment, what to call it, rarefied, finely silky, ineffable. Scent of flowers. The air was light, lightly warm, lightly bright. The quality was early spring, but there was something else when I stopped to attend to it, a feeling of somewhere else, the feeling I have had falling asleep in the daytime, but never awake and outside. There was the slightest instant of vision as part of it, a place, a garden and building walls. At the body keynote Margo told a story I didn't trust, that nonetheless made me remember something. Her story was that when she was a child she stood on a top step and flew down. Later she knew she didn't really fly but when she was in her thirties she knew again that she did fly. What I remembered was the many times I've dreamed I am sitting or standing in the air. In dreaming I remember that I can, that I've done it many times before. I bob up and relax. I don't have to come down. Margo later told a better story. It was when we were drinking wine in Ralph's room. She said she was on a railway platform in India. People she was with gave their bread to a very small boy. They saw the other children dive at him, take the bread. He got none of it. A moment later she felt on her wrist the very lightest of touches. It was that smallest boy. She will never forget the quality of the touch, she said. How it is with Tom is that we get to a clear zone - I get him there - and then he goes away and forgets it. It happens over and over. I'm supposing that was how it was with Joyce. She kept getting me there. I kept coming back to have it happen again and he does too. Salvia urica, mellifera, glecholmaefolia, splendens van Houttei, regla. But still, what to do about Tom. If I don't take the book view of it - which was Joyce's - if I take a natural straight-ahead view - I should be giving up. I thought he'd write again; I now do not believe he will. I thought the smart Tom would stabilize; he doesn't. I thought I'd stay attracted; I sometimes am but don't want sex, ie have lost physical trust. I thought we'd work toward a common project; he can't get free from the Golden West, it takes too much aim and forethought. I seldom can talk to him; but sometimes he's there. He hasn't taken care of the money he owes me and doesn't mention it. He wants to retire to a trailer because that's what he can fund. I can't imagine going on for all the years friendless with him the way I am. The one in him who hates and despises me because he doesn't respect himself is not less, maybe more. He wants the natural woman but doesn't earn the natural woman. He seduced her but couldn't sustain her. Whenever she pops her head up he slams her. She should have a man who sustains her. When I'm with him I have to keep shifting out of her. Being with him herds me toward I don't know what to call it, 'the book' isn't a good name. A transcending stance. In that transcending stance I can do more than the natural woman can. But the natural woman is heart. Isn't she necessary to me? Is she left behind? I still have heart life with Louie and my kids. There will or won't be a heart man later. In the meantime, a different task. These days walking light in my smallest jeans. Bank account yesterday. Coetzee's Boyhood, nineteen chapters, 166 pages, 320 words per. It's clean writing, he tells what shamed him when he was a child. Dry writing, little sensory. Plain sentences. What he would write if he could, if it were not Mr Whelan reading it, would be something darker, something that, once it began to flow from his pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky. 140 In winter he has to set out for school while it is still dark. With his lamp casting a halo before him, he rides through the mist, breasting its velvety softness, breathing it in, breathing it out. Some mornings the metal of the handlebars is so cold that his bare hands stick to it. He likes to gaze at slim, smooth legs in tight shorts ... he is disturbed by the feelings that the legs of these boys, blank and perfect and inexpressive, create in him. What is there that can be done with legs beyond devouring them with one's eyes? Of all the secrets that set him apart, this may in the end be the worst. Among all these boys he is the only one in whom this dark erotic current runs; among all this innocence and normality, he is the only one who desires. 56-7 - The story is very Louie: Karoo, cousin, head girl, lying. At the same time it's lucid erotic hidden shamed Ellie at school. Boy things, cricket, meccano, betrayal and dependency with his mother. He starts with a moment he betrayed his mother to his father because he wanted her kept available to him. That's chapter 1. Chapter 19 is another betrayal of a woman, the Aunt Annie who printed and sold and kept her mad father's books though he had died. It is as if he is saying, These are the crimes that are the debts my writing is to pay. He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories. And if he does not remember them, who will? He steps closer. His eyes are growing accustomed to the light. His father is wearing pyjama pants and a cotton singlet. He has not shaved. There is a red V at his throat where the sunburn gives way to the pallor of his chest. Beside the bed is a chamber pot in which cigarette stubs float in brownish urine. He has not seen anything uglier in his life. The face of the jacket cover is a crooked borzoi face, level and hard on the right, benign on the left, remarkably attenuated, markedly asymmetric. The point about this book is that it is a workable method for the story of my sort of person. JM Coetzee 1997 Boyhood: scenes from provincial life Viking 8 Inventing the body concentration. Think of it as inviting people to work on something, build it. It's a women's zone. There needs to be specific scholarship funding. Sections it needs - intro to embodiment science - understanding motive for separation/suppression, physical practice, community practice. I can do institutional design for [my college] because I'm already thinking in those ways. Should I just take leadership and invite contributions from specific people? Lise body recovery and writing, body writing; Laiwan body loyalty and art; find donors for one semester and let them pick the project; mentorship; Sara body and world love; tax break? Probably; it would satisfy the program in particular ways - should always be part of the larger group; Karen and cultural studies; Elissa, body and 'spirituality'; E sensory writing, institutional design, perception; collective annotated bibliography with many sections. Should I save some of this for CIML? Is the inst still going to happen? Masumoto: "I know that pretty fields are very much part of my annual profits." 10
- Tom:
I need to take care of myself I have been emotionally immature with you Repressed guilt where I've been a bad man So disrespectful of the requirements of companionship I'm so bummed out ... I'm a loser ... I now have to go give in to all this ... all of these feelings are going to run me ... I am having some feelings that are not going to run me I wonder if I am doing the same thing at work "Get a firmer grip on my emotions with Ellie"
He scraped paint off my windows, worked silently, felt the wind sluicing in the shadow of the little house, looked down into the paved parking area of the two-storey apartment building and felt it a pool of time, the 1930s. He was happy. Later I bought him Sunday dinner at Ralph's American Diner, where the waitress was a bobby-soxer in her sixties and an elderly man with greased-back hair and glasses spoke seriously with a white-haired woman. We were seeing him as Uncle Joe the Jesuit. In bed he put a finger on what he calls my butt-hole and drew circles with it while he described pleasure starting at the sole of my right foot and rising as far as the muscle of that side's small ass. That was after he had said turn around and look at my face, and I saw a sublime balanced man, beautiful, I could gaze at with nothing but curiosity and liking. "Where have you been?" "I don't know." When we were awake at 3:30 I said I'm on strike about sex because he seduces my trust and then demolishes it again and again. I said it is as if he is compelled, a brinksmanship, to destroy so he can enjoy his power of getting back. And he does his seducing in a way that double-binds me, he wants to reestablish something but he does it stupidly with declarations and promises that make me more wary. That's a way of handicapping himself isn't it. He wants to find that he can succeed falsely? Can you explain that? He wants to see you conflicted. He wants the hunt to be a little harder. He wants to know he can succeed against resistance. It's a baby's game isn't it. It's an interesting fact that I don't remember in this area, I keep learning things again as if my brain is mushy on this topic. Spoiled structure. Should I forbid all flattering formulas, yes. It's what I should ask in exchange for not improving him. Seven days 'til the [college] avalanche again. - Sharon Butala 2000 Wild stone heart: an apprentice in the fields Harper Flamingo Canada
A philosophy of perceiving, of imagining. Stories of perceiving and imagining at the same time. Synaesthesia and talking to oneself. Dreaming and telling oneself. The interest of human being. Open questions. What can be meant by the uncon. Sense of inner other.
11 It's raining. That means the phone is shorted out. No email. "At once physical and made of spirit" Butala said. I would say it differently. How the 'spirit' people should be read if we assume we see and imagine by means of bodies. Before I went back to school in 1989 the book I wanted to write was Seeing and 'seeing', subtitled perception and visionary knowledge. Modes of knowing that are really knowing but use seeming to perceive. I have done the prep for this work. Understanding mysticism. Clairvoyance, stories of visionary wonders. Finding the stance: it can be really knowing; it isn't evidence for the stuff it's been taken to be evidence for; it is evidence of possibilities of human being. It's a careful balance between credulity and closedness. Unusual sensing. Unusual knowing by means of imagining. Childhood of a philosopher. Metaphoric knowing. The Romantics. Drugs, physical disciplines. A feeling of pleasure and wonder at open capabilities. Recognition. Paravisual perception, Garrett and Hayward. The specific instance - what is seen is being seen in terms of what is seeing. 'The mythical' - something present that sees it that way.
12 Mr Asshole at Starbucks last night was furious that I reminded him he owes me $125 since last summer. This when he is telling me he is spending $400 a month at Azi's. I went away with a tight solar. He is behaving badly and blaming me for telling him so. He doesn't want to pay me back because he wants to buy too-expensive a car, because it will inflate his self-opinion, which is unstable because he hasn't done long-term work to give himself a platform. No, he has, for the last five years at the GW, but it is still only a desk-clerk platform because the manager job has been derailed and withdrawn and is no longer possible. Meantime Mennonite Ellie has got her PhD, finished a book and become a professor. She is on good terms with her kids. Tom has dropped both of his. I'm doubtful about being smug but that's what I am. Mr Asshole was putting no priority on his debt to me AND he has never brought it up AND he was dissing me for objecting to his disrespect AND this on top of his renewed campaign of I love you AND the entire conversation at Starbucks was about him. What is a smart thing like me doing with such a loser. I must be a loser too. Is that the question? If so I should know the answer by now. The answer is I like to feel urgently wanted by a daddy-type. Is that the whole answer? Yes. That's where I originally was and still am a loser. Anything to conclude? No. Any directives for action? No. I am doing it for an illusion and will continue to do so for some time. It is as if none of it is of great importance because I am no longer really jonesing for the real thing of which this is an illusion. It hurts my feelings to be disrespected and sold/seduced, but it doesn't hurt them very deep. I am getting ready to exit but it doesn't very much matter when I do it. - Wanting a project. All my notes, all the stuff I have to read, bore me - they're old, I've absorbed them - don't like to say that - it is like being locked out of my normal way of life. Look at this day, 2:30 and dark overhead, a lighter band over the sea. Runnels on the panes, palm fronds hove-over, flowing underwater. On public radio female voices talking about war. I want to comb my journals for this book - want to have combed them, because it's a labour. I looked up when I'd written "female voices talking about war" and saw the spiderweb on the wall drawing a wide-winged thing. Is it time to stop for tonight? I found the imagining book - where I left off - yes it's what I have feeling for - yes it's what waited - it's a self - heart excited and apprehensive - it could be real living and finding, living the other way. Tom came through the rain to pay his debt and say he had seen that he was off his rocker. He got far enough into feeling a loser so he heard the little voice that says kill yourself. He made good decisions about money after that.
"Think, speak and act from the inner poverty of those who through no superior virtue have been spared." "Talent, of the kind that knows how to wait" 13 This time can I find what to make in these materials. It is a kind of creation that doesn't know how to work. I adore the materials and feel helpless with them. Something has to be added when I make it something to present. My manner is tested. The materials too. There is no one yet to measure it. It is partly what was written in the margins of Being about. 14 Reading the fall 1998 notebook, come to the Castenada notes and immediately feel the Tom story in a different way. The way I feel it is more accommodating of the whole than the attitudes I normally take. It sees a story of two large spirits battling as if in play, battling for their own amusement. In this play Tom is more flexible, he is a spirit who likes to change. He is in some ways cleverer because he makes me his straight giant, a stable pillar he can whisk around. But I am in some ways larger. I am battling him with one hand while I conduct other enterprises. Still the story seen in this way is a story about engagement. The question of breaking it off on this level isn't the question, as it is I want to say on the ground. I've often started transcribing from journals. What do I get stuck on. The journal has one tone and if I edit and fill, as I'd have to, it happens in another less good tone. I like the journal form but it's at odds with a story telling form. Cross-connected significance is there for me but can't easily be set up for a reader because it needs material that doesn't fit into the story. There are different threads of story and a best version would be able to use them all, but they are winding-out as stories over different rates of time. Is it that I haven't recognized what the story really is, so I'd know what's relevant? Will there ever be a way to use this writing? Is it a mistaken enterprise to try? Also that showing how something happens is very long and laborious. What I write in the journal is brief. Also the fact of writing is also part of the story, and I treat it as if it is only telling the story. 15 It said: connecting the child's feeling will make it clear. You are wanting the wrong thing in it, recognition. What you should want is to demonstrate the subtle thing that is your unique interest. It is a story about a study. Your question was, how much can I know. The story is about this question in a particular time. What is characteristic of the era is the amount of written testimony you have had to learn from. What is characteristic of this moment of your era is the amount of written testimony specifically by women. The subtle thing that is your unique interest is, what can be known by women. What are the possibilities of women's intelligence. So it is a story about observing and reading to find female intelligence. It is a story that can only be written by a little girl who becomes a philosopher. So I want to demonstrate what can be known - the knowing - the study that finds it, the resources used. Is that it? Dorothy Richardson did it already - she found the very first moment where it could be done - the autobiography of a question - Woolf was an artist, DR was a philosopher - is there something for me to add? - it says yes, integration of partially lost feeling to come through. Do it in dated segments, not in order. Show someone tracking from early. 16 Yesterday I went with two people to their house in Lakeside. He's Nora's creative director. She's an accountant with a construction firm. He's from a redneck family in Colorado, he says, the first person in his family to finish high school. Now he takes I-8 to work and sees his images on giant billboards. Nora is lending me to them. We dug up fairydusters together, planted them over their fishpond. They were at ease and learning. I didn't pander. Bursts of enthusiasm when it was true. - Bracelet - dark leather with metal rings - brass, copper, aluminum. Tom was walking back to the border from the dentist yesterday, had passed the end of the chase zone for the Poor Marias and their children, and there was a little girl looking at him with old eyes, holding up the bracelet, are you going to buy it or not? "How much?" "Five dollars." Wearing it, feeling and seeing it on my wrist, I have a sensation I remember from long ago, a sensation of conscious beauty particularly in the slope from cheekbone to the muscle between mouth and jaw. Tom is looking good. He worked on the roof wearing clean jeans, a black turtleneck, black suede shoes. He has new wire rims and his hair's a good length, silver and dark in zones, the silver very burnished. - The hours of the afternoon when sun comes onto the couch through the west window I get soft and drowsy. I can look back and up to blue sky. Yesterday aft worked with Eliz transplanting her Cherokee rose to the chimney bed where it can get onto the roof, Constance Spry to the inside rock wall fence where it can loop over to sun on the patio side, New Dawn onto the mended trellis in the sun corner, fuschia gooseberry to the wild edge next to the street, tall shrubby salvia back against the cabin wall. 20 After saying nice things about Tom I could guess the next meeting would be a kick in the solar. It felt like a solid hoof had landed. He showed up when the phone guy was here. I didn't like him at first glance and didn't have time to see why. Later what I saw was his narrow temples, caved in, and his steep-sloped forehead. I was seeing him as a brain without much prefrontal cortex, meaning he lacks control and planning. I'd been all day reading Michael Deragon's surrealist floods and there was Mr Golem looking tense and stupid. He saw me shut down in a single whup like a sea anemone, took it as accusation and went vicious. He said it's all over, he quoted me with his ugly voice, and he called me a victim. Then he spent the next four hours talking, talking. I went to bed ragged. My solar is still tight. Next time he will be apologizing end over end and I will be gradually thawing. Then the next time after that Vic will be back.
- Three days on Michael D, full days. Mainly I wanted to say the mundane is not the enemy, find the marvelous in such a way that you don't abandon the simple in yourself. Don't rail at enemies you don't trouble to investigate. I pulled out of his manuscript the moments of simple address to show him a bare felt voice. Have I guessed well enough? I've been where he is. 23 Tom arrived Saturday afternoon. Despair before we know what happened. Heart-crushing. Could not see the way through. It's over forever. Then the rest of the weekend, including sleeping alongside last night, fond and pleased. Tom cleaned and waxed the car for hours in Balboa Park. I wrote Anne's letter. 24 There has been tension in my solar for some while. I've thought it was about Tom's rages and wondered why it doesn't go away. Woke from a bad dream just now, it is 4 in the morning. I had been given a large pot of sweet peas and was going downstairs to put the pot on the porch - this is the first dream of 824 I remember since I left - and as I was coming downstairs the acid-blasted woman poet from Georgia St was coming upstairs. She was drunk from a party and was going to my bathroom. On the porch my landlord was coming to check in. I had a new tenant lined up but was going to leave two weeks into the month. She talked to the young man and said that instead she would leave him the key now. I looked at him, a gay man sitting with his friends around a table on the floor. Would you betray me? Absolutely not, sweetheart, in a coy gay voice. I was arguing with the landlord, I have nowhere to go, I have a child. Distressed. How it was with Tom. He came in thuggish, hair cut almost to the scalp. Came for a kiss and I backed off. I'd been writing a letter and was there focused and remote with Japanese music of the most exquisite. Instantly in shock from Tom's loutish self absorption. He instantly in shock from my protests. This is unbearable, each of us saying to ourselves, I can't stand this person. Chaotic transition. He's my heartbreaking mean dad. I'm the oppressive unloving woman. His voice goes on unstoppably unbearably beating my brow with mediocre language. I go hopeless and silent, squashed into silence. It broke two ways, separately for each. I made him laugh. I startled him. He went young. When he stopped talking I could track the crushed feeling at the heart. It went up to throat and forehead. Then I could feel an agony-knot in the back. I said, Will you put your hand on that. Sobbed in two bursts, not so much tears as spasms. Then laid my head down next to his lap. It started to go through when I said what I was feeling, that it is harder now to go on than it is to separate, but I'm willing. I don't see how it can come through, I said. From that point I suppose ego gave up. Is there more to say about it. God's grace, I want to say. Life generous and just. And then Tom's thuggish look became a look of naked self in balanced force.
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