| in america 12 part 4 - 2007 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27 Dave Leonard - Dr David Leonard with three books of PRC history - [he] found his name in Still at home. 28 Bemused. The rooks settling. What fetches up in email. That that hard-jawed boy should have access to my sex stories - that he became a learned doctor of history - that he lives in the past of my country - that the classroom in Sexsmith should still be so real, in both of us I think, more than the present maybe. [list of college work hours]
The good life I built into you - camping with Luke, going to Alberta - shopping for Tom's house - my pleasure all the time in how strong and sound you are - your strong growl - your nimbleness - the way you pushed through deep water - the trips where you were my only company - the trip to Niland - the way you stood proud on Bernice's yard and stalwart at La Glace cemetery - having you to come back to so many places, so many times. 20 Oct 2003 - four years four months - began in desolation with Tom, ended with such good grace. You were ready to go for many more years, so well kept. 125,000 - 144,000.
What do I think about Jimmy Rose and 'identity'? I'm not so interested in the notion. When I was younger, I was - esp in my 20s - feminism - not who am I - partly, who should I choose to be - partly, what can I do to make myself seen - to be given standing where I need it. Particularity - what am I like in this circumstance, with this person. Unusualness - some form of unusualness - most people don't feel each other as interiors - it's more, can I like myself with them - I'm seen as ---, whatever that difference is, it is socially uncomfortable. Patriarchy, capitalism, etc. Abstract enemies. It's only each person's body, something about each person's body - pragmatic. The interiority of the girls in Ophrah's school. Jimmy blossomed - what does he have in him to give that - I so much think of identity as the body - the way we feel our lovers - their voices, the temperature of their hands - their bodies and the history of their bodies, their DNA, the development of an embryo. So now gender isn't a trouble to me because I have satisfied myself as a body, I haven't been prevented from - I've done a lot of detailed work to make my mind my own - to see how received stuff has blind spots - that's the key really. March 3rd A dream last week that has stayed with me. I was with my little boy at a swimming pool, I look around, don't see him, is he under water? I walk under the water looking for him. Legs dangling at the ceiling. Over there is one person huddled at the bottom. It's not him, it's a mongoloid woman. I pick her up and toss her up and out. What stayed with me was the vision into the long room of the water. This week: on Tuesday I drove to Tom's and we hung out for hours to be able to see The Gilmour girls. I drove home, came around the corner from 6th, is there parking - yes, the last spot in front of the Martin Building. As I'm walking away from the jeep with my bag of groceries I have the fleetest thought - that it's dark on that corner, should the jeep be there. I've never had that thought before in that spot, where I've parked often since Lips Club closed. At the gate met a janitor coming down with a garbage bag - unlocked for him - was looking at him carefully because I hadn't seen him before. He put out his hand, said his name. So I got in around 8:30 and slept and woke up and worked on packets and when I was ready to go shopping for Tom for a break the jeep was not there. I walked around the block, I kept feeling I must have forgotten where I left it. Four days so far. The book said I'd get it back and it'll be undamaged. It didn't go to Mexico Tuesday night. I feel that I won't get it back if I think about getting it back. At first I felt calm confidence. Even now I haven't howled. Is it the way I became about loss, sigh said yes. I made plans. It's a lot of money. When I had just discovered it my heart hurt - then I got calm. Tom came over and I didn't want to be with him. I don't now either. 4 The kind of loss it is - a loss of establishment - in the four years there were a lot of things I had to fix and I fixed them - I had got it through its 10-year failures and it was solid - so solid, going up the steep hill on Laurel - stout-hearted. It was paid for. It was good for the next ten years and more. It was my speed and normalcy, my joyful burst of assertion in many moments, my tallness, my zip and go. My physical integrity. I'm remembering David's red car was stolen. What it is to have a car stolen. It's a broken continuity. He's less without it. What it is psychologically. I'm less unafraid. 5 Monday morning. I woke interested in the journal project. I was saying, I did a lot of investigating, that work should be where people can find it. I was at the computer as the tea water was warming and opened Fading [In America]. Read the excerpts page of vol 1. It was good, talked about what kind of work the journal is. My dad's death, bare trees. I wanted to start posting that section too. AG. I'm doing last fixing on 5 and 16. 1-4 and 12-15 are up. I'm stuck on what to do about saying bad things about Laiwan, very bad things. I say bad things about Michael but they don't matter because he doesn't have a reputation. Laiwan has a carefully protected rep, it would be wanton damage. And then later there's Louie and with her it's not so much reputation as - what. It seems merciless to publish a hateful or lustful vision of her. I can make alternate pages - a censored version posted, the real page in reserve in the folder. The alternate name would destroy the links? But naming it back would fix them. So I should censor the Laiwan pages. Then what about Louie - for instance talking about her wet slit. Should I censor things about her? It says no. - Everywhere hedged by what people are afraid of. Dave Leonard saying he hesitates to tell our friends the journal is there because it is so 'intensely personal.' (And is he sophisticated enough to read the worst? - No I don't want to call it the worst. The bravest? No because that gives too much credit to their fear. The most unspoken, is what it is. Or spoken in segregated contexts, pornography. Is there a context in which hate is spoken? Talk radio, where it is the specialty. Hate radio. Even my heroes don't write sex and hate. And so one of the things about the journal is that it is polyvocal.) Yesterday Susan phoned. She is taking friendship skillfully, responsibly, saying what she's up to, asking. And Mr Tom at his laptop in his lovely house working on his Casual labor notes. 6 I went to Tom's house last night - hauling a heavy bag with laundry and groceries - and didn't like him and came home instead of sleeping over - sore-hearted at bus stops. What didn't I like - he was speedy and shut down after seeing Mathew - his gut seems inches bigger every time I see him - he described almost buying me at random an expensive art book for my birthday - he was talking about buying a Buick - that was what sent me crashing away home - the thought of riding around with him in a Buick - and facing the evening of his choice of DVDs - and not a word that sees me - the blank and blind random togetherness - the stupid way he arranges his cushions. So there I was on University Avenue in the dark at a bus stop. Out. I was on a bench looking sad and people came by on the sidewalk. A couple of them said hello. Where I got off at 5th Ave there's a flower stand. Flowers spotlit and a little sales shack with a counter. I'll buy myself flowers for my birthday and because I'm sore-hearted. A small Mexican man with a long head. "How are you?" "I don't think I should tell you." I've handed over the bouquet I want. It has dark red pinks with white edges in babies' breath with a white lily. The pinks are scented. "My car got stolen." He starts out saying material objects don't matter, maybe if the jeep hadn't been stolen I'd have been in an accident. "What matters is you." I say yes, and my kids are okay, but I worked hard for it, I really took care of it. Then he shifts. He knows. It has happened to him, it isn't fair. He has been snipping the ends of the stalks off, but then he pauses to talk. He's looking me in the eye. He's right there. He wants to console. He takes up a spray bottle and squirts water on a bundle of dried fibres hanging from a nail. He has wrapped the bouquet in good brown paper and now he ties it up with raffia. At the last moment reaches back and gives me two long-stemmed yellow roses. There they are across the room. In Whole Foods earlier I got the cashier with pale green hair, "How are you." "I'm totally pissed off because my car got stolen." He's instantly sympathetic. "I'm so sorry." He thinks I'll get it back. He and the bagger talk about how often it happens in Baltimore. Waiting for that bus watching a beautiful young woman talking to a man in sign language. She is broad-shouldered and long-legged and her gestures are dance-like. She's brimming with play. Something birdy in her profile, a grosbeak. She has her eye on me too. The driver on that bus - the 10 - is personal, bright-eyed. When I come in with my transfer hesitating not knowing whether there's a reader-slot I'm supposed to put it in, he says, you're alright. When I've stood ready to get off at Park and am plucking up schedules he's muttering "She's going to be taking buses," and laughs and says it's the last day of his work week. All of this and somehow a different relation to space and light because I'm on the street, in the midst. Should I say anything about this year, I don't want to be 62, I don't want to be any age with sixty in it. The journal project - I have that. Wrote a couple of good letters this time, I mean letters that found their theme. Mind as aikido for Kri, the burnt singers of Ian's dream, fairies as early love for Polly. I'm lonely. I want to hear from my people today, any of them. And then Tom shouts up. It's early. He has walked here through Balboa Park. I dress up in my docs and the red waffle-knit hoodie. We take the bus downtown. Walk into the SS Grant. Chandeliers and marble. Have breakfast next-to-next in the Grant Grill, cream linen and waiters in gold brocade vests with modulated voices. We are laughing as if we're younger than we are. The adventure cheers me up. I'm home again a little after 10. Cheryl writes. David. Louie. Susan sends a poem. I get AG 6 and 7 posted and sign up for Statcounter again. 8 Last night excitable Susan in the catbird seat, she said, because she went bowling with her young suitor and the man in the next lane took an interest. There's a thing happens on the phone with her that never happens anywhere else, I get confused, I come to a halt. She is speaking now from such a close attention I sometimes can't make anything of it. I grope around. I come up with something but am not sure it's relevant. I launch into expanding it. I can't make it connect. I freeze. Anything else to say about how it is these days on the phone with her. She is warm about Tom. I can tell her what gives me pleasure. She works with herself about how she imagines me. She said she finds herself anxious about my death. I say it came to me earlier this week that I should tell her I'm not a person who would commit suicide. When I'm old and don't want lingering decay I might stop eating, but it's not in my nature to kill myself violently. She said when I said that her adult self thought nothing much, but her little came and put her hand in mine. The way she said "my little" I thought came from my journal. She dips in. "Conscious and unconscious." That I'm reliable. "You let me climb all over you." I understood that in the way Luke as a toddler would climb on me. She meant intellectually. It's the way I don't drop out when she is in herself. "Let me see if I know how to say this." Dave Leonard after my last note dropped out probably because I wrote the word sex. "I'm laughing thinking of you hesitating to tell our friends it's there because it has barefaced sex in it. It's a difficulty I have with it too." I was writing relaxed and pleased in his tone, which was that, and because he was a man from home, who had looked up the Kinderwater quarters and had walked on the West Place hill looking for Charlie La Glace's gravesite. Knew me when I was that loving likeable person, a good person like my mother. Phoned Luke - he's still in London - maybe he'll stay. 9 He was telling me about productions he worked on shooting in hi-DV because they want to be viable later when the standard changes, but filling the rooms they shoot in with smoke to diffuse the light and soften the image. This morning starting at maybe six I jumped ahead to AG20, formatted, found the refs, read it through, got it up. That leaves 11, 16-19, five more and then the intros. Just now Mary's birthday $50 and the Christmas letter she forgot to mail, a lot of typos and hideous pieties. Oh M what happened to you. I sent Susan the photo of Ed and Mary in their odd clothes, studio portrait from about 1988 when they were a few years older than I am now. [On the back: August '88 After 45 years of marriage] She would have been 64, he 66? What did I want her to say. (She didn't say it but can I.) The pity and terror. That they are demolished. Yes pity and terror. Her toughness. His anguish. Joyce said it was their fault. No. It's what they are but not their fault. This other photo I sent her, Sun photograph 1991 - she didn't see it as I do - as numinous someway - large eyes - as if inwardly focused - right eye is - but R eye is my distance eye - so that's it - the camera wasn't in range of R eye - left side of face is personal, present, R looks visionary. So what it is about that photo is it's divided but open. A speck amused or mischievous on the L, tuned out on the R. 11 Charmed two nights ago on a bus bench seeing a woman sitting next to me get up and hold up her phone to light the schedule. And then another person later, and then a young Japanese tourist. Something people do now. Sunday - just have AG11, 16 and 17 left. I'm avoiding Jimmy Rose on identity. Woke at Tom's. We are fond and brief. I go home. Leave him to write. His computer is there on the desk, clean and quiet, pulsing calmly. 12 I wake thinking how to live - it's a dim flurry. The journal project interests me very naturally - that part is good - Tom is wonderful belonging - there's enough money for the base - on the bike - walking, these days, I'm strong. - I didn't say I looked at the sample edit of We made this with Tom one night - twice - there were stupid mistakes in near streets that are obvious but herb garden, night falling was lovely as is. So was curly kale. Maybe put it out like a music CD with explanation in a booklet.
14
These are from Jimmy1, which I also sent to Susan, who said she loved that it was clear. Jimmy Rose felt some misunderstood but was thrilled he said. I was so pleased to have those replies that I've kept rereading my letter this aft along with theirs. A beautiful visit to Tom's last night and this morning. I took the bike to University Heights Library and Henry's and rode home - second time I've said 'home' - down Georgia Street with books and pork chops. Tom didn't get home for another couple of hours. I opened the French doors and sat on the blue couch beginning Cormac McCarthy's beautiful The road. I think I can't read anymore and then there's a book again I don't want to leave. It's very physically imagined. Work and days. Weather, countryside, the necessities of shelter and food and clothes. A child who has to be brought through desolation and peril. I liked the concreteness of the father's skills, McCarthy's descriptions of how he fixed the wheel of the shopping cart they were using to carry their supplies, how he collected the dregs in oil cans in a service station, whittled bullets out of wood to seem to have full chambers when he only had one bullet left. How he found a cistern of good water under a screenfull of leaves. The child's moral cleanness and the man's competence. Their care for each other. I liked the way McCarthy explained very little. Did not say how the catastrophe happened, held attention by showing scenes. The various houses they entered. Been thinking as I'm remembering it - finished it this morning at the window in bed - that this is one for Luke and probably Louie. Tom came in the door at 6 in his work boots hollow-eyed with fatigue. Long legs in jeans, bandana on his head that he wears under his hard hat. Manly gorgeousness. I doted. He talked fast for an hour, I cooked. We ate next to next on the sofa, waiting for The Gilmour girls to come on. Then he wanted to play a Live Aid DVD and I kept one eye on it while I read. He sat on the end of his bed a yard from the screen absorbed, restored. Tom Petty, who I'd never seen before, singing Refugee, fey narrow man in a jacket with moon and stars on it. 15 Half-way through March. Jeep has been gone two weeks. These mornings begin fogged. It clears by nine. I'm on the roof writing in sunglasses. Letters from Susan and Justin. Justin waiting to know whether his piece is accepted for a conference, beautiful letter. "Oh I'm so feeling love-for-the-world and nowhere to express it. I guess you're it, at this moment." So graceful and so much myself, and more than me, distinguished. He said he's working on ambiguity and I sent a list of books I have been thrilled by. He's the one who at the res just left with me a suitcase full of what he was going to read. A bird emphatic on the rail. Is this smoke? - I think, a faint smell of ash, fires to the north. Susan describing a class in which she said "Don't be judgmental" is taken to mean don't look, and that people love to obey an instruction not to look. My hair, I want to record, looks beautiful on account of the collagen shampoo. I stopped using it because my head was itching and then my hair looked dead, now used it two times and cut off the ends and it looks soft and live. Head itch cured itself, no idea why. What to do today. I've been floating since yesterday morning with Tom, eating and reading newspapers together in direct sun with no other buildings in view, overjoyed. "You love me" he says and I like that more somehow than if I say it. 16 Clock set ahead, it's dark at 6:30. Thick fog this morning. What happened last night. Susan began well. She teases me about getting my way with Tom and that delights me. She liked what a fine mood I was in. But then she got into a vein of obsession and drained me. I am still feeling a stop at the solar. Too much of her voice and it pounded me so I'd have to hold the receiver away. She was talking about why she writes me letters every day and decides not to send them. I guess she got into the state she's in when she writes them, the way I used to be about Tom when I wrote the letters he couldn't stand. The main instruction would be to get out of language into feeling? It says yes. When I told about seeing Tom Petty she said Refugee is the song she thinks of in relation to me, quoted the first line, something like, "You and I have got something going on but we don't talk about it very much." She's alone making her living valiantly, unsafely, and I'm her chosen anchor for now. She's devotional and she's holding herself in reserve, not settling, and that is both very charged and fruitful and very thorny. A sense of remaking herself in detail. I should be writing some of it down when she's on the phone. I said of Tom "He's happy to have someone there when he gets home from work." She said "He's happy to have you there." I said yes I do that. She said it's the refugee.
- AG is up. I'm going to post Fading next. Dave Leonard wrote today. Anne sent him her book and he praised it. - The fact that he copied me his note meant that he wasn't not-writing to me. He didn't get my letter. Maybe his .gov address shot it into spam because it had the world 'sex' in it. What's surprising me about him is that he's being personal and isn't inaccurate. Mentioned Anne saying "Ellie chose an unconventional lifestyle" in a way that could be rightly ironical. (From his note to Anne I could see schmoozing is a work skill of his.) What it is about this correspondence and how eager I am in it is that he's from that year, the Sexsmith year, when I wasn't at home and I wasn't away from home. I mean La Glace people have all childhood in them but Sexsmith people have who I was just that year - young but intent and smart. Finding him accomplished and personable is like having a companion I didn't know about on the long road - is that accurate? Someone who kept pace. Someone with whom I can be that person while I am this one - that's what happens in the letters I write him, a joy that lets me know how much of a loss it has been not to have that. Justin writing in anguish, a bit crazy, to say he hasn't heard from his conference. He's 40 and working as a picture-frame builder, hours' commute every day on BART, little money, a house with roommates, series of women who don't take hold. What his mother did to him. He's beautiful and smart and working alone and almost in secret on something complicated that doesn't get finished, like Penelope weaving while she waits, so that hoping for this conference he was in extreme joy, and dreading to be denied he's in extreme anxiety. And it happened so early to him that it's a disruption in the dark at the root, how am I seeing this - I can't see it, it's invisible - something that happens in the ground of his being - a dissolve. He's ruined for normal life. He's something else now that he has to labour to bring through. Shevek before the second half of his life he said. Letting himself want something puts him into distress, and also into disorder? And that has kept him minimal. Talking about myself too. Have Fading 1-6 done. Little censoring - bad things about fac. 19 I don't want to tell this - I'm wanting to write about something else. I struggled to Tom's yesterday with my laundry in a bag hung off my neck and another bag hung on the handlebars, and found Tom not shaved looking the way he does when he doesn't shave, like an old derelict. He had more errands and went off. When he came back he was carrying a big TV. "I got this for $25" he was declaring loudly as I was looking at the large yellow post-it saying $39. "It says $39" I said from the couch. "But it was $25" he said. I had the little moment of calculation, I mean of watching for the result of a calculation out of sight. I decided to press. I was doing it the right way, lightly, because that's what would work. He kept trying but finally folded. Then he started fiddling with getting it set up and testing it with his remote and tweaking the color and all his TV avidities and I was in the kitchen in shock feeling stabbed at the heart. I'm shocked he is willing to have me believing lies. But then I also thought it's a chance to mention that I think he's using again. Got out the string. It said he is. "IT'S LYING" he said. He said he couldn't do the work he's doing if he were using. Can't I tell from the way he's been? I say yes he's been good, he hasn't raged, but it takes a while for the effects to show. He was using those three years and there were good times. He's very strong. Just recently he's had the opportunity, he has the time, he has the money, he has the contacts. There were a couple of times I saw red in his eyes the way there was when he smoked dope. When I'm faced off with him like that I feel my blindness. I can't tell from the way he's speaking. I should be able to. It's feeling a disabledness. I said I had to go home because I was freaked and would only be able to relax if I rolled over, and shouldn't do it that way. And then struggled home with the bag even heavier pulling on my neck. It's overcast, a low offshore.
- Dave's letters telling about people in our graduating class. Betty a senator for Alberta. Bert Delany dead of diabetes. Pat Ranch practicing medicine without a license. Dale Braunberger in Alaska married to a prostitute. Dennis a retired principal in Bezanson. Gary an accountant in Grande Prairie. Terry Smith in furniture in a department store in Edmonton. Wayne Lock in real estate in Grande Prairie. Dave graduating with grades too low to get into U of A and finding his way later. He wants me to write a memoir leaving out the awkward things. Is offering to place things in archives. I could do that. 20 Things I've done today: 1. paid off G & F loan with Row's money, $6100 Canadian 2. asked G & F to send $USVisa $2900 3. checked on the jeep 4. phoned and wrote Cal-Prop about the garden 21 Fading 1-9 is ready. End of 2005. From 6 on, uncensored and censored versions. They link to SH and GW. 22 My jeep is gone. Tom's computer isn't working. I went to try out the OS10.4 disk. It wouldn't load. Sore heart. Went home. The air in the canyon trail was full of scent. The honeysuckle on his railing has put out thick new growth, bright green. There are a couple of sweet peas, a cerise geranium. Tom had been looking at newspaper possibilities. He said that when he's been writing he's been elated. And yet he wasn't going to take the computer in to have it fixed until Monday. Why did that make my heart hurt. Why is no one making me an exquisite place and buying me a computer. Why do I have to go home to one room and no garden, this harsh mechanical roof. -
- Justin's paper was accepted for ISAMA. Winged migration is on. The strikingly beautiful color of film.
- Peter Epp [my dad's father] born in Halbstadt. 14 February 1927 when he was 42 and his wife 30, living in Clairmont, signed for a homestead in Peoria. Proved it in 1933 and sold it shortly after, bought another quarter. His kids in 1927 were 9, 7, 5 and one and a half. Ed would have been 12 when they moved. 24 The light at 7, an April evening though it's March. I walked home from Tom's this morning and have refused to buckle in all day. Worked on the Fading index and have it posted and linked. Have checked through F1 and 2, have to do 3-6 quick because they're up and I think there may be crushing stuff in them, and then post 7-9, and then DR. Tom came here after work, dusty, balanced, handsome and bent on making up. Happy tales. A showdown he won in the lift, man delivering cabinets who pushed too far. I said my speech, which was that at this point I don't think I will threaten to bail if he slips into drugs. I'd rather he be able to tell me. He listened very closely to this. Said, but he hasn't, he won't. I didn't believe him but dropped it. He blushed when I said Harry could supply him. Should I have wormed something out of him. It says yes. I didn't see how. If I had insisted? It says yes. This morning we woke before it was light and he got into my bed under the window with me and we talked until daylight. Later he walked me through the canyon trail and said goodbye on the far side of the bridge. On the uphill I held his arm and he towed me, singing the Tommy Tugboat song and creaking like hawsers. Susan. Oh Suzy didn't get into UCLA. Crushed today. Does it mean we will lose each other? -
Where - Vancouver and a dry place
Money - at 65 pension of ?
26 I was wailing in a dream about losing Luke. He was maybe 10 and Roy had asked him to come to Africa, somewhere on the coast, where he was working on a building. I was hysterical with grief running around getting him ready for the trip. Collecting clothes to wash, assembling bits and then when there was a pile of them looking for a suitcase, how was he going to travel with all those little packages. I didn't want Luke to go and I thought Roy wouldn't send him back, but I knew he was having a boring life with me and Africa would be interesting. He said a phrase in another language I thought might be Chinese. Yes I'm worried that Luke is back with Roy and I feel he should be in London because he isn't so alone there. Phoned Susan last night. She was in heavy water, very heavy. Her voice had a hardness I haven't heard. A cynicism: if I didn't get what I so much wanted, it wasn't worth having. Everything that has happened since Gia's death has been a clay mold that has made me who I am but that has broken off. And in the other way going to religion: my larger self wants something else for me. I was feeling I shouldn't advise her, because she doesn't have my sort of strength and has to find something she can do with her sort. I'm worried this check will damage her beautiful run of confidence, which was itself so much her gift. Not getting into UCLA does mean she misjudged. That's the failure. Does that mean she has been a bit inflated? Now we'll see how she regroups. For myself, I was feeling last night that she was saying goodbye: that road didn't pan out. What I've lost is a connection with LA, taking the train to the city and going to a movie with her, taking her camping to San Felipe, driving to New Mexico. A lovely friend. What else: yesterday, the bike to the farmer's market, to Tom's for ten minutes, sitting on the bench awkwardly and then home through the canyon. I walked the bike from the gate down, and found I was there in a way I haven't been. I was with the plants. One o'clock Sunday afternoon, in sun. A softness of pleasure. All you lovely things. Standing looking. Wild oats. First butterflies. Eucalyptus, the pale smooth kind like naked bodies, the grey-barked kind. A grove of rather stringy olives. Wild tobacco. An old cassia with many babies downhill. A climbing tangle of plumbago. An orange-flowered vine high in a tree. Something that sounds like a rooster behind the wire mesh fence. Chaparral shrubs. A big pepper tree with strings of pink berries. Patches of scent. In the shade under the olives on the far side of the bridge that mystifying scent of dill. 26 A lot of books from David W. Leonard. His photo on the back flaps of several of them. Oh my. The last great west is 2005. That photo is pink and friendly, white hair and beard. The lure of the Peace River Country 1872-1914 is 1992 and that's the one I saw first - must have been drinking more then - not white-haired yet but like a troll. He signed them all. This is the last great west ... In fertility, the north country is second to none in the Dominion. For years, the wonderfully found soil has lain dormant, waiting, waiting. Looking at this history with more knowledge than I used to have of how things are done, I have a stronger sense of how much was already in place when I was a child, and how rapidly it had been made. Accelerated settlement. There were photos from the first. Another thing I realized is that I'm unusual in art for the concreteness of my background. I mean that the whole place was still preoccupied with physical construction, weather, terrain. I thought this looking at Polly's packet - the art she likes, that I find etoliated and distasteful - Beardsley, Redon, etc. About Polly: what I notice in a lot of women students, voluptuous self loathing. What is that. It sighed to say yes that is the question. Is one of those things more true than the other? The voluptuousness? Blocked adoration? Is it true loathing? No. Internalized? Yes. Say Who loathes me? Yes. Am I on the track of this? Yes. Are they disabled from being interested in science? YES. Should she be doing yoga? Yes. But is she angry at herself? YES. Because she doesn't give herself what she needs as a body. Yes. Is she a druggie? Yes.
27 I dreamed there was a light on my bookshelf and a lizard attracted to it. I was watching it climbing on the wall thinking I should get up and catch it. The light went out when I got up. It was on the floor next to the door, a large fat frog or toad. When I opened the door it hopped out. Stood there, a brown bird. There's a wind today, west wind, unusual. Dreamed a lot. For a while I was naked looking for clothes, riding naked on my bike. What's today. Fac call tonight. Polly to finish, then Kri and Jimmy. What would I rather do. Play. 28 Cheryl last night - her voice - the cadence she has always had, a little slower and rounder. She had just come off an interview about her show at the National Gallery. There's that and a younger girlfriend. They are in Europe a lot. The winding roads of Sicily. Cheryl is happy. We talked like people who know each other, very easily though we have hardly seen each other since nineteen eighty-something. I love you she says when we are about to hang up. I love you back, I say. Wednesday. Yesterday a strong wind all day. There's sun after days of fog. Talking to Cheryl about the journal project even a little I begin to feel its possibilities. At Starbucks this morning imagined a gallery show with sheets of text next to images. That thought can raise others. Walking back, imagining writing something about privacy, what's forbidden to say, with examples. Irritated with Susan for phoning yesterday lamenting that I am not in touch. She emailed Friday morning. We talked on the phone for a long time. Then again, when was it, Sunday night. She saying she was casting off her mold, including me. So then Tuesday - every other day. I don't want it. I evade it. She had me pressed against the wall last night. I dodge into pleading emotional damage, but in fact it's crisper than that. I don't depend on people when I take blows, I don't expect to spread it into other people, and I don't agree to absorb other people's blows. The exception is Tom and that's because he gives so much back energetically. So what should I do with Susan now. No question of folding. I'm not 'there for' her, I'm doing what I do. So do I go on evading or do I declare. Declare? Kindly? She's had a blow, I don't want to heap on another. I can't get away with token gifts. I'm willing to lose her over this. I've lost Louie over it. It's a pressure I loathe.
Yesterday I began to write an intro to DR. Thinking with this one I should
start transcribing at the beginning.
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