| in america 13 part 4 - 2007 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
25 July Pavement outside Reach Clinic. Sun in my eyes. "What time is it?" "Almost eight o'clock." That was a man I thought would know. Last evening I walked the eight blocks to Point Grey Road and steps down to the beach, and then along and back, and it was easy, I was light. Sat on the edge of the seawall in low sun, narrow beach in front of me, couple watching their kids, a young man on a first growth cedar stump with a book, leggy nine year old girl in a pink skirt posing on a rock with a stone in her hand, khaki ocean chuckling between black rocks. Freighters at anchor far out, two longboats paddling past them. My sign on the blackberry path was a single plant of dames rocket. I missed Susan last night. Do I miss Tom. I'm uneasy when he doesn't write but his letters have been so posed and loveless. Harsh. His sense of writing is manly pose not integrity and clarity, and I can see he could succeed with that, but it's not for me. He has the other vein though, of high energy play, that one's good though it's just for him, I mean it doesn't bring anything out of me, or yes it does, a female passivity of admiration; it's a dominance mode. Why did I miss Susan. I thought of sitting in her jeep with her on the hillside above Plainfield, orange light on the hills and meadows, the blooming ditch, goldenrod, horses, her slim bare leg. The way we were seeing beautiful together. Walking in Kits in twilight I'd thought of seeing evening light with Jam. Being with girls. I'm shut down because I'm not intimate anywhere, I can't write because I'm not intimate anywhere. 26 A wonderful dream of traveling. Do I remember any of it. Under, blue sheets of water whizzing past. There was a lot more. Jitters after getting up early to go do blood tests. Sun on the maple tree when I woke, sun straight into the closet, on the left sleeves of my bright shirts, blue, orange, red, rose, green. Sun on these 4th Avenue trees. What am I doing today. Finishing Becci. Studying DV. Work on mag? - [Greek restaurant on 4th Ave] I'm lonely, I'm bored, I'm hungry, every menu a list of things not to eat. Suppertime on 4th. What are people wearing. There's a pale man whose flowered shirt is the color of the flowered tattoo on his arm. Here's a small old woman with thin hair dyed red and large running shoes. There are the mountains pale blue in the smog. A fine silver blue Cherokee pulling in at the meter, a Sport, probably 1999, now with a wet spot under the rad. Bulky mothers, belly bulk. Mild sky of 6 o'clock. Luke's books, my library books, unreadable. A baby came along in a stroller, a one year old, holding her feet sole to sole and all alive. I lit up to see her. Meter reader holding a cell phone to his head looking at a pretty girl talking on hers. - A trout. It was good. The man in the flowered shirt came past again, glanced at it, said, Is that a trout? A daddy packing two little girls into the back seat of a convertible Carrera. I want to see beautiful graceful people. There must be a yoga class up the road: women in thin tight pants showing their jiggling upside-down-valentine bums. A woman with a thick red birthmark coruscating down her arm from the shoulder. Gulls circling high up. Why are they doing that. Not so much circling as milling. Note from Dave saying he was leaving his office. "Dave gets to have dinner with Ellie Epp whee-ee!" He was alluding to Still at home, which is generous in the way he is, now. How is it going to be. I'll wear my jeans and red sneakers and the white shirt. Earrings? No, they feel too awkwardly vain. We'll go somewhere to eat, I'll go off my food rules somewhat, maybe have half a dry pale beer while he has two glasses of wine. How will he be dressed. Some kind of dockers sort of pants, chino, beige, and a short-sleeved golf t in a bad color, with a small logo on it. He'll be portly, a little around his middle. Shoes? Loafers for the occasion. He'll be red-faced. His hair will be white and neglected, long and dry. He'll be freshly shaved. I hope no moustache. He'll be wearing a watch but no rings. We won't hug. He'll be prepared with questions to ask. I'll prepare some too. I'll wish he was better looking because he's nice. He'll miss the optimistic sweetness of my seventeen year old self. He'll find I'm not bad for 62 but a bit hard. Interesting-looking, though. He has been reading Being about so he'll have questions about it. He'll say again that I should write something about the Peace River Country. I'll say that's not the kind of work I do. I'll enjoy his cultivation, I'll be drawn out, but I'll wish there were more surprise in him. He couldn't have done what he does if he hadn't been a steady labourer. He'll enjoy my wickedness cautiously. Maybe we'll go sit on Jericho Beach to see the fireworks at 10. Then he'll go to his hotel at the airport, where he'll muse over the evening, put it together for himself, then and now. On Sunday I may tell Louie about it. I'll write Tom. - I took the bike down to the beach and just sat. There is so much green and it's so strong and deep. - This is funny - Dave got into Fading 10 by filling in the number 10 [in the browser window] on his own account. I haven't linked it yet. I found out by seeing on Statcounter that he'd jumped to the mbo site from F10.2. 29 Kitsilano Coffee Co, Sunday morning. Did he mean it? How did he mean it? I said why doesn't he write a novel, since he wants me to. He said if he did it would be called The year Ellie Epp came to Sexsmith. Why?? I said. Sexsmith had been dying, there had been three elevator fires (there a digression about Albert LaPoint walking his dogs at midnight), people had started shopping in Grande Prairie and the stores were getting run down, Sexsmith wasn't the wheat capital of the world anymore, and then Ellie Epp got 92% in the provincial exams. I never thought of anyone thinking anything about it, I said. People talked about it, he said. His mom in the library talked about me taking out books. He wasn't reading books, he was playing baseball. The previous year there'd been a celebration for the boy who got the highest grades in the county. His average was 77%. They'd thought that was good. He didn't look like anyone I'd ever met. I sat on the steps to meet him, I knew he wouldn't be late. There I was rigged up in my best. When I looked down my white shirt front there'd be the white lace underwire bra with the near sides of my breasts separated by a flat hard inch. Lotion on my arms, enamel bracelet. Hair washed and still damp. And there passing on the sidewalk the man whose face I recognize from his book jacket. Baseball cap with curly white hair under it, white beard shaped like the tip of a spade. Round belly, polyester pants, black oxfords. He keeps walking though I'm looking steadily and smiling. He doesn't recognize me. Then he says I look like my mother. It's a very even-toned conversation. There are no bursts. He says I should use the journals to write a memoir. He says I should write a novel. Later he says have I ever thought of writing plays. He suggests I could teach philosophy at the Grande Prairie Regional College. He tells long stories about people who resist or complicate historical preservation of their sites. He repeats one about Emily Loberg because he has forgotten he told it. The strangest thing is the way he drives. He has rented a Yaris, which is a blob of a car, and he drives it hunched forward as if he can't see. In stop and go traffic he brakes hard every ten feet. When he's changing lanes or nudging out of a parking space he hesitates, creeps, jerks. I am thinking, he was a ball player, where did his athleticism go? Is he the worst driver I've ever ridden with? We're driving west on 4th toward Jericho Beach. He says he's read Brain and metaphor. I say what did he think. He says he doesn't see how the part of us that makes decisions can die. I say animals make decisions and we think of them as dying, but then I drop it. At Jericho Beach we sit with our backs against a log among quietly gathered groups facing the water and the mountains. As ten o'clock arrives people set their lawnchairs in lines across the sand to face the end of the bay. They look like theatre rows. Then the fireworks, etc, and then we're on 4th Ave in gold-colored street light among crowds waiting for the bus, walking to look for tea. So he's a man who ditches body. He doesn't think perception is knowledge. He lives for months and years in archives of provincial papers and microfilm. He's contented. He has a government pension and good royalties. He says he'll walk me to my door. It's just across the road, I say I can manage. He says no he's going to. We stand on the sidewalk. Do I look apprehensive, probably. He says may he kiss me goodnight on the forehead. What can I do. I stick my forehead forward. My old friend! he says emotionally. My old friend! Very old, I say. 30
Tom on the phone yesterday fine and sane. Happy. Bud had been to see him. Pilgrim had phoned. He told me Pilgrim's take in Pilgrim's voice. I was standing in a phone box in the corner of the Safeway lot. A pop can prospector zoomed up on a bike bulging with sacks to check the change slot of the other phone. It was seven in the evening. Tom said he liked Dave for the kiss on the forehead. I was sweet on Tom for liking someone because he was nice to me. Looking at Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance because it's the only thing in Luke's shelves I could bear to read. I like the travel writing, the landscape and arriving in new places, and I like the rumination although I'm also suspicious that it's wrong. I like the format, someone thinking philosophically. He's tracking something and he's misrepresenting it. He has a question about the analytic attitude: why does he have it and his friends don't. He thinks of their attitude as an interest in appearance, mere appearance. He calls that artistic and Romantic. "Purpose to inspire emotionally." The technical mode of mind (I wouldn't call it classic as he does) is a good question. 31st Tuesday evening, Jitters. Yesterday morning I peed a lot and my waist was suddenly half an inch smaller. I didn't look hard, I looked pretty. Eyelids. Put on my black shirt and biked downtown to pick up my passport, up Burrard, over the bridge. Afterward sat in Blenz, biked to the river, crossed on the little ferry to Granville Island. What it was like in the aisles of the market. Joyce. The years when I'd be carefully spending small amounts in joy at the colour and abundance, wealth of the world, flowers and fruit, color, color, delicious food. I sat in the market courtyard in the sun, just sat. Small kids and pigeons. Loud evil gulls when a Japanese tourist tossed french fries. Then a new bike trail, gravel path next to the dark choppy sea, up around the Maritime Museum and then Kits Beach and Kits Pool and finally ending at the seawall below Point Grey Road. I stopped to lie on the grass above Kits Pool. There were half a dozen fourteen year old boys on small bikes hanging together in a warm alcove off the sidewalk doing skateboard tricks on a short flight of concrete steps. They were schooling. They'd hang together at the high end of the rectangle, all facing the same way like riders on horses, and then one would flow forward and leap the steps, another would follow, sometimes all of them in a line. At the far end of the space they'd turn, some left, some right, and ride back to leap the step upward. There was a blond boy, the only one in a helmet, who'd do a wheelie on his way up. I watched them on and on for the sane natural relaxed way they grouped and paused, spoke a bit, moved. They were more than graceful. I don't think I've said it all. They were taking the jumps each in their own way, showing themselves. They were in beautiful liberty. They were moving bodies, they were together as moving and pausing bodies, talking very lightly, talking like moving and pausing. August 1 Woke in the night and couldn't sleep. Finished Pirsig. Had forgotten the epilogue, Pirsig with a new wife, famous, rich from book royalties and a movie deal, and the boy dead. As I read this time I was wondering whether I could write something better, so I woke just now from dreaming I was going to adapt the Golden west journal. I liked the descriptions of motorcycle maintenance. In the philosophy I thought mainly he was blind to the fact that what he was doing was male. He was beating around the bush. He was hitting and missing. What he was doing, compared to what I do, seemed baroque. A search for what's wrong in the way we think, yes. His way of searching in long chains of argument, no. The scene with the chairman of the department, understood as tourney. Men scoring points and thinking that is thinking, well described but not seen through. The drama among figures was somehow right. Man on a journey with a boy. Man has had his vital self zapped so he has become a tamer more cut-off self, but the wilder self is still there and shows through in scary ways. Boy is more in touch with the wilder self. Man intends to send the boy away and break down into the wild self but the boy's distress and clarity reaches him and he feels himself become the wild self again. It's alright. They carry on. In the real, the story is about the man torturing the boy by his self-division. The boy is playing what usually is the wife's part, the wife is absent in the book, but boy as Pirsig's younger self is correct. So I feel Pirsig touched on the real thing, and he demonstrated the wheel-spinning of the argumentative attitude that he called reason, dialectic, but he didn't get to the core, which is dissociated body. The fact of body was nowhere in the philosophy, though the traveling bodies were shown cold, hungry, joyful, resting. Motorcycle was substituted for the fact of body, motorcycle maintenance substituted for knowledge of the fact of body. Pirsig is present in the book as a body, and knows, as a writer, that he has to keep breaking back into the physical journey to hold the reader through the philosophy, but in his philosophy he keeps shying off saying male rupture is what it's all about. So it's an interesting book partly because it's unclear. It's enough right so that people are hooked by feeling themselves obscurely described, their obscure selves obscurely described. The evidence of Lila is that getting famous for not getting it - for getting it only partly - wasn't good for Pirsig. Is that what Chris's death means? And then he papers over it with something specious about Chris returning as the daughter by his second wife.
The other thing that happened yesterday was visiting David and Dorothy in their house more and more buried in green. That story later maybe. It's Wednesday. Jitters Café. There was Dorothy older by a year, 94. She fell in the living room, knocked against a cart so the large TV fell on her. Yellow bruises on the right side of her little round head. It's such a little girl's head. She peers up hopefully and playfully. She's winsome. And there's her tall son, just a skeleton, bringing a bottlecapful of medicine and tipping it into her mouth. Cooking food he cuts up finely, salad always chopped, mushrooms diced. Big plates of food. She steadily eats it down. We go for a walk, she with her cane. The blackberries she picked sitting next to them in a chair are gone. A new road is coming in above their house. The strong broad house above the river being shut into a garden David doesn't tend, so the paths are closing. What used to be his bedroom window is broken and not repaired. The Delaware grapes are creeping up through it. The father of the house is dead and now mother and son are seeing out the end days of the house her father built. Trains shunting in front of it, highway and skytrain trestle behind it. A dozen houses left on River Drive above the log booms and the mill, the dredger company, the luminous river in evening light silvery and quiet. What David is, historical. I don't want to overstate this. There he is, graceful in his way, rooted more than he knows, rooted unusually and expansively in the people he knows, the complex layered place. So is he deferred? He would think he is, but maybe not. Seeing his mother out is what he is, like the cherry stems on his dashboard with one dried blossom, a little crab and a branch with deer-hoof buds at its tip that are like the pincers on the crab. David's love, David's eye. His natural task is loving damaged and unusual quality. I'm feeling now that I went unprepared to feel where I was, the damaged and unusual quality. Seeing people with contexts, people who have contexts. Who else do I know who does. 2nd A pretty dream of an orchard blooming pink and swarming with blue and pink birds, both called peepuls, red peepuls and --- peepuls. The orchard was on espalier, very frilly. - Peepul turns out to be the sacred fig, bo tree. Earlier - I think earlier - a slag mountain with a lot of workers moving on it, Mongolian women? Not really, but like that. It became that ragged mountain from a bank of high buildings devoted to trade in powdered substances. Visually interesting dreams because of the fireworks last night? Dull and false thoughts.
3 Went to the DR files and was writing bits for the section intro. When I wrote a paragraph about Robert MacLean there was sudden energy. Body came on, there was body in the writing. - Wanted to say Wednesday night when I was on the seawall waiting for the fireworks a tall man with white hair and a long nose came down the stairs. I looked hard because it seemed to me Robert could look like that now. He's 60 and head of a department. Not an interesting-looking man, wildness gone out of him. I liked hungry people. Like. Is why it's Susan I'm missing now. Missing how. I think of her ferociously kept little body, her yoga butt, her determined good clothes, her study in how to be marvelous. Her holding out. Yes miz you I approve.
4th Dreamed a novel I liked. It was called To kill a mockingbird. (It wasn't that book - in the dream I didn't remember there was that other book.) I now don't remember much about it. I think I got to it by talking to a man at a doorway. American man of the 50s, something like that. Two strange failures. I was thinking of them last night, to remember to write them. 1. Yesterday morning I was waiting for the hygienist at Reach and went around the corner to the washroom. The doorway was closed and I stood staring at it for a moment wondering whether someone was inside. Then I noticed that I hadn't seen the other bathroom door open next to it. 2. In Dave's rented car I wanted to open my window and was staring at the lock button not noticing the hand winder below. Both were mistakes of set and seemed early dementia or I could say the momentary blank gives me a sense of what dementia is. With Louie yesterday at Jericho Beach through the afternoon. She talks about her boyfriend, I talk about mine. She had come from her therapist and told a story of gazing into each other's faces and reporting what they saw. She had felt her face around her mouth become soft and sensitive like a horse's mouth. Then later she felt her whole trunk feeling her therapist's face the way her face had. She describes the wavering change between being her own face and being the other's. I say is she writing these things. She isn't. - Blenz on Denman. How's the West End. Breezy at 10 in the morning. Here's a little fan palm. Old queers with good haircuts. I have an hour before J arrives. Afterward I can go home through Granville Market. Snooping last night in Luke's box. Was it bad to do, maybe, if it makes me evasive with him. When I began I didn't stop. Letters from women. He gets a lot of adoration. When I see the simple ways they hope for everything from him I'm pleased he hasn't had me in his pocket, and then I think that if he'd had me in his pocket he wouldn't be the wolf he is. Two pages of his handwriting where he says he hates Roy. He has no mother - Roy wouldn't let him have me - he crossed that out - then says he has no father and no mother - his mother abandoned him. He had adoration when he was little, he keeps it coming but it disappoints. Susan has a blog! Susan is talking down to potential clients. 5th When did I drop her. March. Something like 4 months ago. I was wondering whether it was 7.
- It was good with Jam. I was at a visible corner at Blenz writing, and felt someone standing in front of me. Slight small brown person with a new haircut. Shades. We walked to a bench by the water. What do we talk about. Handwriting. Narrative, how we both can't read our journals from that time because we didn't say what we did. We just wrote the language of the day, she said. Writing narrative helps with knowing who one is I said. Yes because it contextualizes she said. She liked hearing Rowen is thriving on the fund. I could say truthfully that I haven't told him who it's from. She's going to Las Vegas because Manny's doing an MFA there. I tell her she can travel on 2-lane blacktop. She's grateful to know that, she imagined nothing but highways. Akbar's at UC Irvine. What else. She was in Bombay, asked to read. Made some connections there, felt something about India, about making something. Understanding that making isn't necessarily writing, it's doing something to keep it going. I wanted to talk about the Valhalla house. Asked how she remembers it. "You mean the house we shared" she says. "I liked it better when we weren't sharing it," I say, "and you probably did too." We laugh. Some things are locked in the vaults she says. She means because of looking after her mom. I say it seems an amazing place to me now. She says it came so easily. "Yes. We saw it from the road. When I went to ask Tone she already knew what I wanted." "It would be good for the house." J remembered that but she didn't know it was I who said it. - I'm just plodding. Don't know what else to do. About Susan. I haven't looked at her letters until today - she was gone, amazingly gone - but when I do, what I feel is convinced. What kind of convinced is it though. I'm impressed with her quality, and when I see her quality I think she can't be that with anyone but me, and then I trust her although I have good reasons not to trust her. Her quality, her ardency. The poems. But the better question is, what is my quality with her. Besides physical shame: I can do something about that, am doing. Kits Beach. The large deciduous trees, not beach trees. Crows not gulls. The idiotic way people talk to their kids. Good-job-Molly. Look-at-that! Mommy's-going-to-put-it-over-there. - I've moved away from them closer to a pretty couple. He arrived in orange shorts and she in a short red dress with white polka dots. She's come out of the water in a black bikini with her tan beaded everywhere with glitter. Prettiest round rump. The sea is very dark khaki woven with very pale blue sky reflection. Are there more colors than that. When the wavelets rise a brighter shade, a bit more goldy. Freighters standing in the bay give it a sense of open ocean, distances, China. The drunk Indian at the back of the 20 bus last week who kept saying Blue clouds! There's one over the notch to the northwest that I think of as Rowen's direction. It's an eccentric cumulous clump like an offworld organism, quite a dark blue on its back edges. White, grey, dark blue. What a beautiful girl. Young. In ten years she'll still be pretty but she won't be perfectly round and sleek. Seagull's shadow on the sand rapidly altering dark shape. 6 After I check email I'm still hungry for messages so I see whether Statcounter has come up with anything more overnight. Someone in BC was at GW16. That's the winter passage in Point Loma where I was cracking in neuroscience reading and with Tom. Last night with David at Iona Park. When we came there was the last sun on the tips of the reeds this side of the river. We sat on a small pile of logs and looked around. The river silver in dimming light. North Shore an even dark green band that made me think of totem poles. Then the dark blue mountains with their outline cut sharp against the sky. Mauve clouds to the northeast, western sky darkening to orange. David was perfect company, I felt completely natural, supported, looking with him. The best moment was when the first tug came downriver. It was sitting low, pushing a lot of water, setting up a strong wake. When it had passed we saw the outside edge of the wake arriving at our shore in long shallow scallops like the diagram of an acoustic waveform. The scallops arrived as rolls of water, we saw them coming, gleaming with color reflections, rapidly and smoothly, like nothing seen before, exciting. Seeing them was a kind of ecstatic fulfillment. Then more tugs going either way, small powerboats, a couple in a kayak far over alongside the deep reedbed on the reservation side. We watched a line of a contrail appearing over the mountains to the northwest, pulled at some distance by a tiny shining speck. When we left, there was the broad flat band of seawater silver blue to Vancouver Island and the west dark orange above it: luminous silver, matte dark blue, luminous orange, simple and grand. A tall flame standing in the sewer treatment plant. Horses in the field next to the airport. The sharp double lights of airplanes swooping toward the landing strip. Airport complex lit up like an oil refinery. Nearby ditches full of a native tangle of blackberry and wild plum in the dark. Narrow blacktop running us through all of this marvel. As we were walking to the truck David said, Do you think it will last us? I was looking at the definite buttons of yarrow yellower than ever in the dark. Sweet clover fine-branched against the broom. When we got to the truck I smelled hay. - [Opposite: list of pages linked from the del.icio.us social bookmarking tag for embodiment: paper on Thelen and Smith, Merrimack College Margaret Wilson - Santa Cruz Piece defining embodied cognition Wikipedia embodied philosophy The green fuse - Adrian Piece on flow Braidotti on cyberfeminism Conference announcement - undergrad math education and mbo Another educ - gestures and math learning Theory and psychology special issue - the body and psychology How bodies matter in design Society for the Scientific Study of Embodiment - bibliogs Opus Corpus - anthropology of corporeal appearance Research on place and space embodiment - bibliogs Memoirs of a postgrad on AI mbo cog Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty Wikipedia on habitus Wonderful wiki page on embodiment Paper on mirror-touch synaesthesia Paper on how technology is not assessed as cultural Journalism on the Media Lab and virtuality Christian contemplative tradition On 'embodied evolutionary computation process' in robotics Essays by an art writer Amazon collection around Gail Weiss's Perspectives on embodiment Collection of Piaget Symposia series, Developmental perspectives on embodiment and consciousness Varela and autopoesis Susan Oyama talk MP3 Paris conference From autopoesis to neurophenomenology What will we know - my page tagged under poetry, epistemology, embodiment Site for phenomenology and cog sci The Edge - Dehaene on math cog Paper on body and emotion Something about philosophy of emotion Somebody criticizing theory of structural metaphor Andy Clark pages online Aesthetics and digital art Tim Rohrer's page Cinema and embodied affect, Walter Benjamin Kinesthetic memory Something on tacit knowledge Embodiment and video games Embodiment: a conceptual glossary for epidemology Anthropology paper on a culture that despises body Feminist theory: embodiment and the docile agent Institute for embodiment training - "practices mix bliss (the complete surrender to the deep energies of the body) with presence (immaculate mindfulness)" - Ida rolf and Will Johnson Focusing Institute International Society for the Cognitive Science of Religion Journal - Sensorium: embodied experience, technology and contemporary art Emily Carr College - Center for Art and Technology - Char Davies' project - Intersections, digital studios Blog Age of Embodiment etc] - Shopping on Robson when I'd ridden the bike back to Louie's. Jeans at the Levi's store, 501's, one black pair and one blue. They're 32/31's. Banana Republic dark green teeshirt. Now I'm outfitted. It's still only five good pairs of pants for two weeks but I can make it work. Tom is writing every day almost. - It's too early to go to sleep but everything is done, taxi called for 8 tomorrow.
Ah he's going back to all that. He left to go to South Africa. When he came back I was gone. I'm feeling his leaving. 7 When I was having dinner with David on 4th - we were at a table on the street - the sun was shining into his eyes from the end of the street. I asked whether Karen when she phones him says, Why don't you come and see me, and he said in his light Fraser Valley voice, No, she says, something like, I guess I really should stop phoning you, I don't know why I keep doing it. And then David said, with tears in the edges of his eyes in the intense red light, You know the way it is with distance. - Those people someway still married. The other story I thought to tell when I was lying in the dark between 4 and 5 this morning was the story of Louie's peaches. When we went to Jericho Beach she took with her into the car two peaches someone had picked in the Okanagan and brought her. We carried them one each when we walked toward the sand. She was eating hers and I was slowly, thoroughly, rubbing the fuzz off mine. They were cold. On our blankets I peeled mine meticulously with fingertips, dropping the shreds of so-human skin onto the sand. They were freckled with red. First bite. Sweet directly under the skin, tart next to the stone. Colder in the center. After we'd been talking I pick up a skin shred. Dry and faded, freckled like a lizard skin, I thought. It is 6 o'clock my last morning in Luke's bed in his junky room with the big maple stirring on the street. Vermont 8th Civilized discourse. Things have been popping out of my mouth. Caryn's tagline: Create new knowledge for social and personal transformation. What do you think of it, she asks. I hate it! I said. What do you hate about it? It's wooden, it sounds like old knowledge not new knowledge.
[note at the top of the page James Barratt recommends Nassim Harrmin in physics] 11 What I felt about the Klein movie. Bonny Klein Shameless NBF It's 5:41, grey morning at the window, a drip, is it raining maybe. No. What's that roar. Green layers, pine, maple, sumac from the top down. Persimmon in the midst of a collection of freaks. 'Disabled.' Catherine someone who is a minister in the Canadian government but so floppy she can do nothing for herself, is transferred from bed to wheelchair with a mechanical sling. A paraplegic choreographer. A man facially disfigured by birthmark surgery and radiation. Klein herself trundling in a motorized wheelchair. The beautiful woman, somebody Frazee, who is Catherine's lover. Klein's handsome husband and remarkably beautiful children. After the movie, Jim, Lise, someone else, and a tall very good looking well dressed black woman standing talking about the film. I was still sitting against the back row. The tall black woman, who was fifty, I thought, putting on her long black coat, said something like We're all disabled in the end. I had a flash of rage. I was feeling, they think they're not disabled now, and I am. I said very harshly Everyone over forty is already disabled. Patricia, who is apart from her birthmark so beautiful, insisting programmatically that beauty is not appearance. Why do I hate that. She is selling out what's well made in herself, her grace, to defend what is botched. Is that what I mean? It is botched. Catherine saying she is as much in nature's plan as any able body. No. Nature's plan for her would be death in infancy. She's remarkably lucid and generally able but a body looking at her feels pain nonetheless. - Look at that, a milky vapour risen in front of the green. I haven't said it yet. It's more like this: one looks at these people and wishes them well, one sees the compensating intensities of being, but one is appalled anyway, one doesn't want to be them. I am appalled and want to be appalled, though I am of their category. I can see it is better for them to be pushing back socially, pushing in, but still I love rightness of body, I would rather be that. Here is another question. Why do I feel blank in front of Nehassiou. She's pretty but somehow a blankness. A doll. Big eyes, big lips, an eager childlike niceness of manner, a nice-girl Canadian voice. Why does she feel frozen to me, as if she isn't a real human. Compare Susan for instance, whose face I'd want in front of me forever. I always want to look away from Nehassiou. - And then too I wonder whether people feel something like that with me, I think sometimes they do. The thing about Bonnie Klein is that she has a professional husband who gives her beautiful remarkable children and a house in the Gulf Islands, and she got him because she wasn't disabled until she was 47. I was never in a position to have what she has. Was that my anger? Her film displayed what she has and I don't have. Students. Emilee the mild straight A girl Buddhist, David the little faker, big dumb Billy. Justin with a yellow line tattooed from right cheek down his neck and under his collar to an unknown depth: his mark. - Melanie, Belle, Annie. The best moment today was Emilee this morning. I was ready to give her my beautiful bibliogs but saw she was bothered. Had the wit to ask. She was glowing yesterday, she said, but this morning doubting. Chair dialogue. Which chair do you want to be the glow, which the doubt. Now sit in one. She begins as the glow, describes it. I say, Say I. She does. Now sit in the other chair and speak as the doubt. Then I summarize: she wants to fit in and be successful. Back to the glow. Look at doubt, what do you see? Then she startles. A large startle. This is interesting, she says. She's feeling a large compassion. It has never occurred to her to feel it for herself. It was very quick, I've never seen it click so fast - her Buddhist training was ready.
- [At the student-fac reading] I read Rhu B for Laura and suffered in the weakness of the writing. Leslie Freeman read for me, femme and deformed, stunningly intelligent. She rose to Queen authority. Patricia's piece about a woman in a grocery store who touched her arm and said We have something in common. 12 Childhood bedroom. I'm going to be living there alone. a lot of furniture, drawers full of stuff. Judy and her family have been using it as a summer place. I notice there's a gauze curtain over the window. I'm going to push it back. Some sense of men who might look in. I'm going to move the bed so its head is on the south wall and I can see out the window. - Do I remember ever dreaming the bedroom before? - Woke this morning, rushed to prep for Becci and Laura [grad speeches]. I did Becci badly and Laura well, I think. I could only tell that my voice was strong and my hands were shaking on the page, where they couldn't be seen behind the lectern. The embodiment colloquium was poorly attended, as if it has died - Jaes, Vanita, Jimmy, Kri, Lise, me, Melody, Gary, Anne. My sign-up sheet wasn't full.
14 What I most want to say is that I walk around thanking my body. I am so swift and light. I feel straight up and down, balanced on my soles. My new jeans hold my rump just right, not tight, fitted. I like my clothes. Today the black shirt and blue jeans, blue Chucks. I feel 30.
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- This lot exists for me less than any group has. I haven't wanted to knock myself out with individual interviews. The first advising group was wrecked by mosquitoes. I'm not interested. Having more fun in fac groups though. Jim is my pal because of Susan. Tomás isn't here to drone. Lise is back. Caryn is buttering me up. Campbell likes me. Francis is improved. 15 I'm in bed at 9:19. Speaking bodies III this aft. A big circle of people. Better organized than last time. Up at 4:30 this morning to do it. Nancy Shapiro protesting that Woolf had said something about herself was uncreditable. I said no she is generous to herself in wanting to testify accurately. Lorraine the folk musician smiling luminously because I touch on something she knows. Jimmy a nuisance in a toga bursting out too often. Greenleaf the Buddhist staying for all three though he doesn't like 'body'. Karen Campbell reading Woolf's night misery passage in a voice correct to class, so that its humor showed. Gary enthusiastic in ways I suspect haven't much to do with what I see. Kri in the corner. Quiet Emilee. Steady Justin. Justin steady, I should say, getting it. Karen Campbell getting it. Lise not really getting it but getting whatever she can, set to be eager. 17 Saturday morning in rain. It's an hour before the taxi comes. I woke at 1:30 and dozed after that. The last dream has left me sweet. I was working with a young man sanding a table. We were on the third pass, I said it was true that every time was easier. The young man was across the table from me. He said "You've been looking at me in the twilight," meaning I had been eyeing him. I said "Yes I've been looking at you in twilight." He came around to my side and I lifted my arms to him. We were holding each other. But when he started to lead me to the other room I said "We aren't going to do that." "We aren't?" "You're married." "That can be fun too." We were in different parts of the room as I was saying this and that. I said "There's a man who would be heartbroken if I cheated on him, and I'd be heartbroken if he cheated on me too, so I don't do that." Phoned Tom from the office last night. He was at Starbucks composing an email. He was still in his work clothes. He has been going out after work, without changing, to write a note and then eat. I heard him on the street, in the hard-sounding washroom, walking on University Avenue. He wanted me to talk more, didn't want to let me go. We talked from 9 to 10 by the wall clock in my office. At the end he was going on too long about Danielle the crazy woman upstairs. I was trying to get away. I said I was fond of him, I'd liked hearing his voice. He said, Are you still fond of me after the last part? I said Yes, I'm disregarding the last part. That exchange pleased us both. Earlier he said the phone might suddenly run out of battery, "so I love you and all that." I was charmed by the off-handness, he's still doing it but he's not robotically determined, he's comfortable. In other words we're both happy apart and relaxedly confident in each other. Belle yesterday shining when she spoke about her new sweetie. Married at 18, married 18 years. Pulled out of basic training to be a narc. Married her narc partner. Escalating duties. They were good at it. Came to the point where they didn't want any more to continue, they were being asked to do things they didn't want to do. Went Christian. Lived with the Amish. He stopped hitting her when she put on the headcovering. The Amish didn't believe in birth control. She had ten pregnancies, seven children. It was always rape, she says. They were in an early church group, the Searchers. Learned Greek, Latin and Hebrew to be able to study scripture. She disagreed with the group on baptism, convinced him. They wrote a paper for an anabaptist publication. Were shunned. He began to see "angels, demons, whatever they are," who were instructing him to kill his family. She went to the police. She and the kids were taken into witness protection. He found them. Ran her off the road, broke a window in the car, began to drag them into the woods. Her six year old son pulled out his pocket knife, held it up to his father, said "Don't you hurt my mommy." Her oldest is 21, her youngest almost 10. I met Melanie, Daniel, Sarah, Samuel. The one strange thing was that she still speaks to the kids in third
person, "Mommy is going to ...'" Always the same grey clothes.
The 21 year old has a prosthesis from the hip; she looks after the kids,
counts the money.
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