| in america 10 part 1 - 2006 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 3rd January 2006 Tuesday morning, cold after the rain. The heater isn't keeping up. Took him [Luke] to the train station this morning, watched him walking away alongside the LA train. He was wearing jeans, his excellent boots, his red-blue football jersey, black down vest. Carrying a big red and blue duffle against his shoulder, and his dark day pack with its water bottle sleeve. He looked restored: a tall brown-skinned man taking long steps. 4 Wednesday morning in the black. It's damp. I have such an ache in my shoulders these days, shoulders and arms. All over really - had it intensely in bed under the stars. An acid ache in the muscle. Is that all I have to say? Don't like to be awake at this hour but I wake at 3 and that's it. A lot of slog ahead, ten evals, the magazine, the focusing lectures, some embod planning I guess. Want to get Still at home up. 6 This morning I open the computer and there is what I am always dejectedly looking for, someone saying Being about is major. It's Damion. "I'm appreciating it a lot. I really see it as a magnum opus - in philosophy and about existence. So now I've vowed to read your other chapters." There was Sarah last week saying the letters on the philosophy of embodiment are what she hungers for. Where can I set up embodiment studies properly? Where can I get students who can do the range - science and personal processing, politics, a physical practice, skillful critique of existing discourse. [My college's] model of knowing-being-doing is correct. Who have I had who's done part of it - Susan, Millie, Carolyn, Juliana, Anna, Layla, Jody. I have the platform worked out. I know the parts. I have the sample lectures showing the span. I have the mag showing student work. I have the web worksite though it's a mess. I have stuff for an anthology. I have a couple of student curricula. I have
The love woman / work woman letters! Yes! 7 Transcribing the last journal 2005 Aug-Dec because there were bookwork notes I wanted to review, and because when I wake I can't bear to sit down to student slog. So I began to make a title page for Fading [ie this section]. Image - tried a couple - no good - then I realized shoulders.jpg is the one. Doubled, out of focus, strong, subtle. Don't know whether I've earned that one but now I'm eager to post current journals too. I will have to say they are heavily edited but - . (Should I backdate to 2002? It says no.)
That way I can have the earlier ones too. Letters by topic - 'spirituality', writing, love woman/work woman, embodiment studies, processing
There I wrote intro text and felt what I've wanted to feel - creation. - Smallville. Story about someone who can steal identities and powers - here's fear close to - what if I have sold myself to an evil power and been jumped - why would I think so - because of Being about - it's implausible that someone who began as I did wd get there - here is the other side - why I hang back - isn't it? I'm afraid I'm an evil supplanter. If I were, when would it have happened? Evidence: the way I'm not connected to my family. Evidence: the way my dad cried when he looked at me. So how far back does it go? How far back does success go? No, not that. School was mine, Trapline was, what will we know was, the slides were, the garden was, analog/digital was, and so the doc was, but - ?
9th Monday. Visible happiness somehow. At the farmer's market yesterday morning there were pleased faces looking, and after I dropped Tom at the tent and stopped at Walter Anderson's people were wanting to speak to me. A man in the shrub rows said, "Do you work here?" "No I just look as if I do." "You look as if you like plants." "When I look at plants I feel happy." "Me too." Tom says it's because I was with Luke. He came at 10 and we sat talking. He is reading, listening to NPR. He woke hearing sentences being formed in his head. He was startled. They were different than anything he had read. He loves the vet tent. The food is good, there are no rules, it's like a holding company, he says. People leave good books in the book pile. Affliction by Russell Banks. He's going to talk to psychologists about ADD and think about a pension. He can go on an army pension and then switch to social security later. "I'm living the life of the mind" he says cautiously. All of this is to my taste though I know the next time he shows up unshaven and cranky I'll dislike him again. For the record, though, crashing to the level of the army tent seems to have been a good idea. Maybe his unseen guide does know what it's doing. I have more or less finished transcribing the last journal and today sat down and hacked through 3 and a half evals. Six to go. Ten days. Going to work at Scott's now, need the money. When we were sitting together yest I showed Tom the front page for [this new section] and then read him the story of our afternoon at the military cemetery. We both had tears in our eyes after. 10 What I got done today - phoned Canada Revenue and copied docs for them, transcribed San Felipe, worked on both mag and [in America] design, organized many pages of focusing lecture sheets, sent 3 evals. 11 Working on a lot of things - transcribing the rest of the Gendlin notes this morning so that vol is done, more work in focusing lectures, working on [this section's] index page, patching pages for Logan, Michael. Evals for Richard and David. Set up Carol's and Becci's. And now fixing up volume front pages for Still at home. I love designing pages. The white space. Happy working on SH. 12 Wish I had an east window. There's sun but it's chill and dim in here. Exactly a week before I fly. Gardens - clothes shopping and shoes - 4 more evals - focusing notes so they're done - SH up. Carol's eval says brilliant insights, brutal honesty. "The key to my successful relationship with Ellie was my deep trust in her. She consistently provided a safe space for me to write about difficult topics. Her empathy combined with strong teaching skills and a swift kick in the pants when I needed it kept me motivated and believing in myself. I'm forever grateful to her." What I like about this is that my toughness made her trust me. She's working class. Lisa was solid. She's happy with her semester. She wrote her book. She liked me. I saw her and trusted her. Cynthia - oh Cynthia - she got everything. She got everything she wanted. I got her there, she got her there, she did massive work. Anna - she got to the bottom of it, she saw where her lines converged. She's ready to start. Layla - she got to real creative writing. She got all the way there. snow and fire is good at least in its childhood parts. She's another one whose tone went when she was writing a long paper. Conclusion - have them organize better and write chapters like individual papers. Altogether: here's my semester self-eval: I didn't get to write anything interesting to anyone - well, Cynthia, some - so that was a wasted semester creatively. In terms of effect, I did it for Gwen, Lisa. Layla's theoretical platform comes from me, Anna's too. Cynthia arrived because of earlier semesters with me. AND arriving at [this section] makes me happy because it saves these 4 years' writing. It also sums up as if teaching is done. I did invent embodiment studies as I went along. In the three years here I invented an academic field. It is mind and land sort of. If I wanted to go gangbusters on it I could. I'd need a crew. I'd need a marketer. Do I have more important things to do?
13 It's 4:30 in the aft and I've been working on Still at home since about 5 this morning. What did I do. Vol 1 is ready - linked and edited for typos. Vol 2 has 6 parts, is distributed and linked but not edited. Photos for vol 3 are set up on pages. Organized vol summaries properly, including vol 2. Seems not a lot but it was full concentration almost without breaks. I was laughing with pleasure reading myself at 14, laughing at my candor. 14 I can't read this book but I'll read the bits Tom marked because they were about him. There is a kind of willed conservatism that helps a remnant people cope with having been abandoned by several generations of the most talented and attractive of its children. Left behind, the remnant feels inadequate, insufficient, foolish and inept - everyone with brains and ambition, it seems, everyone with the ability to live in the larger world, has gone away. So that with the family, with the community as a whole, no longer able to unify and organize a people and provide them with a worthy identity, the half-forgotten misremembered ceremonies of ancient days affirm a people's existence, but falsely. And it is this very falsity that most offends those of us who have left. Wade was locked into an old familiar sequence: his thoughts and feelings were accelerating at a pace that threw him into a kind of overdrive, a steady high-speed flow that he could not control and that he knew often led to disastrous consequences. But he did not care. It was only additional evidence that he was in this particular sequence again. Most people saw him as tense, quick, unpredictable and hot tempered, and indeed he was all those things too. But since childhood, he seemed, when he was alone or imagined that he was alone, sometimes almost to let go of consciousness and float on waves of thought and feeling of his own making. They were not fantasies, exactly, for they had no narrative and little structure, and not memories or wishes, but warm streams of dumb contentment that flowed steadily through his mind and remained nonetheless safely outside of time, as if they had no source and no end. Everything the other people said and did was half a beat off the rhythm of everything he said and did, so that the others seemed almost to be members of a different species than he, as if their species had a slightly different metabolism than his. Without Lillian, without her recognition and protection, Wade would have been forced to regard himself as no different from the boys and men who surrounded him, boys his age - deliberately roughened and coarse, cultivating their violence for one another to admire and shrink from, growing up with a defensive willed stupidity and then encouraging their sons to follow. Without Lillian's recognition and protection, Wade, who was very good at being male in this world, a hearty bluff athletic sort of guy with a mean streak, would have been unable to resist the influence of the males who surrounded him. The loneliness would have been too much to bear. 301 Lillian's love had kept the young thing in him alive long after it had died in everyone else he knew. He had started to drink heavily and had grown confused and angry. And he quickly lost his connection to that lovely young thing, the fragile humorous affection for the world that he had nurtured and kept alive all through adolescence, and he grew increasingly angry at the loss and began to blame Lillian for it. The more he blamed her, the further he flew from it, until, indeed, he was like the men who surrounded him, and one night he lashed out at her with his fists and afterwards wept in her lap, begging forgiveness. He had tried to break through the pain and confusion of his life to something like clarity and control, and it had come to this - this dumb helplessness, this woeful thickened shameful inadequacy. At bottom, he knew there was love in his heart, love for women - but try as he might, he could not arrange his life so that he could act on that love. There were all these other dark hateful feelings that kept getting in the way, his rage and his fear and his feelings of pure distress. It was something else, something that had always been there, in her eyes, even when she was a girl and Wade had first fallen in love with her - and suddenly he realized it was why he had fallen in love with her in the first place and why he had been so obsessed with her in all these years: he had looked into her eyes way back then, when they were both high school kids, and he had seen her intelligence, the wonderful complexity of her awareness, and he had seen his own smart eyes looking back at him, and for a while he had felt intelligent too. Then, after a few years, because he no longer saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers, he had lost that belief in his own intelligence, and from then on, all he felt when he looked at her was stupid. 321 Then she closed the inner door, and Wade was looking at his reflection. It was Pop he saw looking back, twenty or thirty years ago, haunted and angry, kept outside the family of man, compelled to stand in the rain and cold and darkness alone, while the others sat around a fire inside; and because he was not there with them, they were unafraid and slung their arms over each other's shoulders and sang songs or whispered sweet secrets to one another, men and women and children full of good intentions and competence, people who were able to love one another cleanly. He, like his father before him, and like that man's father too, Wade's and my grandfather and our unknown great-grandfather as well, stood outside, hands buried in pockets, scowling furiously at the frozen ground, while everyone else stayed warm and loved one another. All those solitary dumb angry men had once been boys with intelligent eyes and brightly innocent mouths, unafraid and loving, creatures eager to please and be pleased . Were they all beaten by their fathers, was it really as simple as that? Russell Banks 1989 Affliction Harper and Row Res shopping. I bought 2 things that are good - they're both tightish zip jackets, one in purple microchenille, soft. Red waffle hoodie - poppy red, orange-red. So what do I have to wear (list). Pants are the problem. Tried on so many. Terrible designs. I love my cargos but they're so faded and shabby now. What else. Black linen if I fix them. 2 pr of those lightweight green, they're not great. That's it. More pants. 16 SH, 3 of 5 parts mostly done, pressed from 6 to noon. Yoga for an hour. Then 8 hrs straight working on the magazine. 17 SH5 is done. Leaves 3-6 in SH4. I'm driven in this. And then there's email from Montreal, a forum in Montreal about body and technology. I look up the invited speakers, a Portuguese guy called one of the 25 greatest living thinkers (Nussbaum is the only woman unless one of the non-English names is too) and said to be "the philosopher of the body", and another guy teaching in a film department in Australia who is writing about cognitive models. I'd like to speak in Montreal but then I go into Murchie's culture studies context and I think, no, these people would find me too simple and not understand me. Murchie alludes to a couple of my points but he's talking about them from within the old language and he hasn't worked them out. Reading this stuff I feel again how simple I need to be in my language, to be able to think. Wittgenstein and Gendlin are too. Murchie's language so betrays competitive anxiety. Without those signals of mastery I wouldn't be taken seriously. I'm not interested in questions about modernity or fracture. It's all men, a club of men who play the mystification game. I have so much selected my own models and no one else has selected the same, so there may never be a way I stand in front of people as a philosopher. Artists but not artists in art schools. Who IS my audience? Just remembered a dream. I woke at night and said I should remember the image of a tree with a dense black fog held close to it, just within the outer tips of its branches and around its trunk. Then later the sight of a human body with that sort of black fog around/within it too. Furry, as if. Finely fibrous.
For the record - when I got an email from Miz S I felt my hair standing up in its follicles. "Being the most powerful person on earth, it's a rush." Commander in chief. 19 Trying to post Still at home, will there be room? - Yes. It's up. It's beautiful, with its big bright photos. Me, Al, hospital, grass, Frank, Sexsmith. Ah, makes me happy, makes that young person happy, that her earnest playful self is speaking to all the world. What more does it need - vol 4 part 3 or 4 has a lot of bad letters I shd weed down. Maybe more images than it needs. Some intros to be written. Maybe more vol index quotes. Vol 3 - is it? - has some indications for links I haven't made. My blurred black and whites are surprisingly beautiful. Scan of Judy's carriage. Really like the design, its clarity, the white space, the red links. The lined edges and cream-colored pages with typewriter font. - From Becci: Ellie I had a rare silent moment in a coffee shop and have been reading your livejournal project. It is beautiful simple and astounding. Thanks for having the bravery to share. So few allow others to read this sort of thing. Feel as if I got a lot done today - Still at home - went to Scott's at the right moment to pull out his rosemary and pick up $150 - got the magazine proof up - mailed 3 evals - got the money into the bank - watered downstairs - letter from Rowen saying he liked the Mabinogian this time. I want to do just one tiny strand of blue [hair].
20 Six in the morning, traveling today. - Northwest flight to Detroit. The front of the plane being packed in. I'm dressed up for it. My new Goth cargos, black - that I had to cut a lot of straps off - shortened by six inches - gather at the ankle - take in at the waist. Red hoodie, tight black velvet singlet so I don't have to wear a bra all day. Docs. Behind me are two men who are bonding in the virtual community of football. "They just hired a new guy." "Sooner or later he's gonna say one of two things, I'm gonna sell, or I'm gonna move." "The Packers will be back," said in a tone I can't describe, uncertain complacency. "He may give it one more shot he's right on the cusp." It's taking half an hour to board - 48x6 = 288 people with a lot of bags and coats. Those guys are going to drink and they're going to talk sports all the way. They're laughing, they're getting into it. When I was 16 I'd already have been all excited about the man next to me. Plainfield 21st Both people in my row were poking on their laptops and I was wriggling and it would be hours still so I unfolded my Mac and finished Carol's eval and thought now what, and opened the Orpheus file. And there I became someone I used to be, open-mouthed in beauty. Who am I being instead of this. Could I make a living and be this. Nothing is more important than this, this is the touchstone. I'm being something now that's connected to what I was when I was succeeding, and it's what I am in ease, and this other thing is what I had to find in my uttermost and maybe I have to keep being the successful one to support something else, but now I should somehow transcribe Dames rocket? (No apostrophe, have I decided?) It will need a different format? It's all whichway not narrative. There is the writing, the slides! But the journals are floods of notes. It was about being - I can say that. I was a solid young person. I turned to air. The beautiful work is air. 23rd It's snowing, I see against the pines. Miz Susan arrived at the next table while I was talking to two new students. I concentrated on not looking at her and it had the effect of stiffening my conversation completely. And then S came to give me a hug. She was wearing something pale blue over what look like new dungarees, and she wasn't her most radiant self. She holds a long hug that I don't feel except as firmness, but a good hug. So what are you going to do this semester? That needs a conversation and we have to find a spot. There she is. Live. I relax. She says in her parenthetical way that I like fighting with her. I say I do. When I think of her, even, I feel the roots of my hair stand up. That's pitta, she says. Energy. Oh definitely. (I sigh.) She's cold, can we go somewhere warm? My old office in Studies. She takes the dishes away, I get some tea. She comes into the room and shuts the door. I sit on the floor and leave a space next to me for her. She sits down across the room. We laugh. So why do I want her to write, she says. There I pause and go in. I tell her the story of the row of laptops before Detroit and the moment gaping into beauty. I say it's an airy person, and her paced writing is that, and I want to write in that way and I want her to be able to write that way. When I say that I have tears in my eyes. I say I can't read that work aloud and don't think it's voiced. She says yes, voicing brings in too much ego. I've said ego is the solid dwarf. The book says don't do that beautiful work because it's evasion. So why isn't it evasion if she does it? Because she does it differently. She says she sees flame. I say yes, flaring, like gas wells. In me it's paradisal. Something transcendent uses the dwarf to teach, in me. There we both are in [our college] the land of social workers. She needs the best. She said she could see rhythms appearing in thieves that come out of childhood. I say there are people who would be interested in that. Dead people, Duncan and Creeley. She should be doing poetics somewhere. What else I said was that if I could fund it I'd want to do that kind of writing with film. She said, You've never said that before. - Grizzly man. What about it. Alaska people. The bush pilot, the coroner, his friends. The filmmaker's interest in Treadwell's footage, use of his footage. Comments on his footage. Treadwell's childishness, his madness, believing himself a saviour, dying for the bears. His parents in Florida, stiff split people with animal figures on their lawn. Depression and booze, and then his mission. Herzog at the end looking into the blank button eyes of the brown grizzly who may have killed Treadwell and saying "I see only indifference and an interest in food," that Treadwell imagined a relation. He was in early love - he was deep in early love - he did know a terrain, he knew enough about bears to stay alive for 11 summers. He succeeded in being the child self very nakedly. He seemed gay and said he wasn't. Very gay. After the scene in which Herzog is listening to the tape of Treadwell being eaten, Herzog shows a fight between male bears who when they are on their hind legs look so much like people in bear suits. Sergeant Brown and Mickey. Fur flying. Teeth in each other's necks. Bloody big jaws. The scene where Treadwell shows himself patting fresh scat. "It's still warm. I'm touching her poop, that was inside her." He wanted to be a saint and be martyred. Took a blond girl with him. And what was Herzog interested in, and what did he know. He was interested in the chances of early love lived out? Not realizing that early love if lived correctly does not stay young. It's still dissociated in him, only he has moved into the other side? I think. Werner Herzog 2005 Grizzly man Discovery Docs 25 Joe Fendler and Tom Fendler both in my mail box. Joe says is Tom still in San Diego. I write him back and give him Tom's email address. He sends Tom an email saying he's going to be in SD tomorrow, cc's to me, I write him back with Tom's cell number and phone Tom and leave a message. Meantime. I like to see Susan across the room in the cafeteria, her boyish toed-in walk, little square shoulders and little loose hips. Woman nearly fifty who clumps along so lightly, it's very pretty. She isn't this time the flushed goddess of the upper air. She isn't in goddess state, and she isn't trailing naked showing her underpants and she isn't coming on to me and I am not imprinted but a little sad - a little. Jim told her the first thing they should do this semester is send out her work. She said (to me across the table), "He said it was extraordinary, and I hadn't been seductive." Guinevere in my office last night. I was seeing another person, the cost, the person who bears the cost. We were talking about beauty and staring. I was saying I want to stare at beauty and am ashamed to be seen doing that. I say beauty is something in early love, loving beauty is a kind of body loyalty. And there I'm thinking on - is this a topic for next res? I have never written about beauty. "Something twisted about beauty." Mirror cells. Wanting to be and wanting to avert. Jim is liking me more and Ralph is disliking me intensely. I described the experiment with Betsy and gesture in advising group. Hold the coffee cup with your right hand and gesture with your left. She was at first frozen but then continued to talk in her former controlled academic way, but with magnificent elegant gestures of the left hand. So large-minded a being. (Ralph said did I have human subjects permission, I said I had thought everything we do with students is human subjects. We clashed swords.) But the experiment is the interesting thing. 27 What happened yesterday. Susan. I brought her upstairs and she sat in the chair across the room and I told her what it was last time and saw her feel it. And relaxed and saw her speed when she was describing Amanda talking, describing the way her hands move and as if her comic timing. And was intimidated by it. And hugging her, the fine-grained whiteness of her neck against my face. The way a conversation with her can include a motion. She will notice what I do with my hand. "Yes, like that." When I was talking to Susan my body came on, I could feel a faint light in my sex. The moments in the workshop when the faces around the table were absorbed - such lifted softened absorbed faces. Margo across the room looking at them beaming. Anything else? 28 Tom and Joe sat two and a half hours in a café. "We never dropped eye contact" Tom said. He has large wide-set eyes. Tom could see Uncle Joe in him. "He's a beautiful man. He's intelligent." He was loving. He said "All of that is in the past." It was Dorianne who pushed him to make the call. "The women in our lives are our angels" Tom said. The woman yesterday who said to me, You have a lot of light in your eyes. It stopped me. I had tears. I couldn't go on, for a moment. I was looking at her letting her see her hit. Nancy Mellon. I'm feeling the way both these things became nothing when I told them to Susan. She isn't interested in the journal. She won't reply to anything about it. She wants to think we're intimate but she speeds along being hot shit and these amazing things aren't told.
Another thing it was useless to talk to her about was Al.
How to show intelligence in writing. 29th What else am I angry at. That I was there at the dance in the mirror, thick and grey and dancing badly. That is making me cry. Larry and Cynthia were jiving. She was wearing high heels and he was wearing blue jeans and his shirt collar up. Sean's slides at the end. Astro, Sally, Caroline, Juliana, Jessica. Anna was beside me crying. Dave, Sean and Glenn drumming. I was beside myself. Our new pretty belly dancer rolling her white hips. I'm lonely. I'm sad. There's a drip off the roof, warm snow thick earlier. I don't want to be here anymore. I'm dropping here.
There she was knocking again, this time sharply. Fuck off. That second workshop didn't really work. I'm tired? I'm lonely. I don't have anyone of my own. Monday 30th Love woman's handwriting. I crashed when Margo pried about Betsy, is what happened. And then she didn't deal with it. She just said she'd write a note because she's teary these days. So fuckin' cry already. I liked that I thought to tell about the light in Anna's eye at graduation. "Anna is very lucid." A blue crystal. Becci drunk last night saying I'm the most beautiful woman she has seen. Later saying the same thing to Anna: "It's like you're transparent." Is it goodbye sadness? The way I don't get frightened when I stand up to speak at graduation. I speak looking at individual people in the audience. My eye wanders unselfconsciously. Oh the drumming. Sean and Dave smiling into each other's eyes as they built it. The conversation at the round supper table Saturday night, Becci, Lisa, Anna, Amanda, Alexandra, couple more people. Layla. Becci was talking about her poem about wanting to fuck everybody. I said I was like that about my family. We went on from there. I got up and showed them my Goth pants, we talked about whether I should dye my hair blue. 31st My night with Susan. If I think of it as play it was good. She wasn't seductive in the wrong way, she wasn't trying to hook me in the true love forever way. She was fond. First thing: she persisted. I was in bed, hiding. I heard her bootstep, she knocked. Silence both sides of the door. I didn't move. Her footsteps going away. Coming back. She didn't go far. I lie still. Don't move my legs. I don't hear her leave. I'm trying not to swallow. I'll easily wait her out because she's standing and I'm lying down. I hear nothing. I go on not moving but when I have to swallow I can't do it noiselessly. I'm listening on and on. Have heard nothing. It's been half an hour? She must have sneaked away. I pick up my book, start turning pages when I need to. She's gone. I relax. Then her little voice from near the floor. Ellie let me talk to you. I open the door. She's lying across the threshold with her knees up and her head on a pillow she fetched from up the hall. I laugh. "You outlasted me." Will I hold out? She's here. She went to some trouble to be. I said I felt it's no point talking to her because she isn't going to cop. She says she'll agree to anything. I say that's not it. Etc. (Now not having the patience to say it all.) Further in - she did cop. I said she's compelled to capture everyone and especially advisors, and it's excellent but also I'm not sure she knows what she's doing. There's something young. She turned her head away - we were lying together on the floor with our heads on pillows and our shins up on the bed - and cried. I stroked the hair off her forehead. Fine silver hair dark at the roots. Black eyebrows, pink skin. Translucent white teeth. Such colors. Mouth. Soft mouth hard nose. When we were standing off - earlier - I'd said what I had to say but she was thinking she should be waiting for more. I got into bed and turned my face toward the pillow and had a nap. She was lying at the foot of the bed watching snow melt off the roof. When I woke I was ready. We were together from two in the aft 'til 10 in the morning? She wanted to give me her beautiful earrings, that were exquisite on her, pale sapphire rectangles in silver. No. They're right on her. I have to patch this together. Haven't the energy to write it straight through. Lying against her back with my hand on her bicep, joking that it was like a boob. "More than a mouthful is a waste" she said. Laughed. We laughed. Lying against her was making a field with a texture like flan, I said, very fine-grained. - Here is the most unusual thing. Was it in that passage during the night, I think, when we had been sleeping and woke and were murmuring. She said she was seeing waves of color, and then after a moment I saw one after another a band of very pale yellow light sinking down the dark field of my closed eyes. Their pace was slow and regular, slow count of 4 maybe. I had never seen anything like that. Watching it didn't affect it. When I said it had stopped she said hers had too, because she had spoken too much. She said earlier I had been poking into her third eye. Liked showing her the photo of Judy in the pond, Frank on the trampoline. Did I like that best, probably. Was there something she liked best. I'd guess having Margo leave a note outside the door so we knew she knew we'd been in a bed together through the night. She'd captured the cutest and smartest and most reserved of the fac. I didn't mind, either, showing up down the corridor in white pyjama pants, orange singlet, hair tumbled and a sapphire stud in one ear, having been heard laughing in my bedroom with the cutest and smartest of the students. - Nancy Mellon: "I'm having a fabulous time reading your Being about and discovering through your work more of the beloved community of the question." Tomás: "OK, I went ahead and did it, started reading your diaries. Felt a bit odd. Off and on, kept reading, while drifting back to life outside [the college]. Until I came to Doug and 1 Cor.14.18. And laughed and laughed. Cos that's my all time favorite verse from the Bible!" Subject line was tam multa genera linguarum sunt. Rowen: "I'm sorry I am so late responding. I met the most wonderful girl and have been distracted. Geos and Methis are really the same person in the end, just with the memories of both to guide his thoughts." Miz S: "looked unexpectedly trashy beautiful when i stopped at the rest area think you petted me into a fine polish just sleeping with your arms around me and will miss terribly your heat at my back your lovely breath in my hair may i tell you my bicep is lording it over my poor little breasts having got their squeeze and even their admiration from you. remembering knock-out sexy you camera in hand leaning by the closet laughing and studying the mechanism looking smart and adorable at the same time." 1 February Now I'm frightened. My heart is banging. This small thing is very large. If he's lying about small things he's lying about large. He drove to Carol's to get money. He drove to his meeting with Joe. He has let shame and bluffing spoil our best moment of winning through. It means I have let my desire to seem successful as a woman twist my relation with students. - Evening. I don't have more to say about my night with Susan. It was fun but it didn't go deep. Should I say - now I'm aware of readers - we fell asleep in my narrow bed and woke and murmured and didn't make serious moves on each other. When she was flirtatious I understood that she was playing. I said if my eyes went I couldn't work. She said she'd read to me. I said, Like Mr Rochester. "Reader, I married him." That didn't scare me, I knew I was safe. She said, You love Tom. Yes I love Tom. The scare this morning went very deep. We told stories about our loves. We got all our complaining done. She will drop me again and I likely will be ignorantly savage again but we have both seen how it works. 2nd
Yesterday while I was doing my laundry at Midway and Rosekrans Tom and I were eating outside at Baja Fresh while he told me more about how it was with Joe, who wanted to explain why he believes in government. He's working for the Legislative Assembly. A slight man in a camel sports jacket, blue oxford shirt, striped tie, dockers, tasseled loafers. He's very high up, effective, wants to do good. Tom listened. He had learned to listen. A great grief has been lifted. Ah. I'd like to tell Joyce, Joyce would be proud of me. I'm proud of Joe, that he wanted to save his father and went into government to be able to do that. I'm feeling time. "A life is so long." Yes. When Tom said "Would a hug be in order?" he said "Certainly" and standing next to the bar they held each other very tight for long enough to feel it.
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