| in america 13 part 6 - 2007 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7 September I'd been with Carmichael, he'd laid his head beside mine, he was commenting on the day. I'm telling that just because it came before what I want to see again, a strip of swimming pool. It is as if mostly covered for the night, but the near strip is showing and lit from below. When Don's new wife returns I want to get into that water. I strip. I'm crossing it. When I do the racer's turn at the edge, head over heels and push off strongly with the feet, I'm surprised how far I glide. Sometimes turning my head correctly to gulp air. - What it was about this dream was the water lit from within and then the sensation of motion. There's the mountain straight ahead partly lit. A crow. More crows. I'm wanting to be gone. Last night Louie offered to be the book - the interesting moment - I was talking about my mom's blankness - was when she said she saw eggs being broken on the grass. I said it wasn't grass it was dirt, I was breaking eggs into earth and stirring to make a cake. My mother was angry. Louie said, She stopped your expression. Yes. Louie was letting me see what breaking eggs into earth suggests - it means 'enlivening,' putting life into what I do - what I do in teaching - the stories Dorothy wanted to hear were stories about doing that - I looked up at 'enlivening,' directly toward the window across the street that is reflecting this building's grass-fed yolk yellow. Dorothy saying she sees things, animals sometimes. "Last week you said you were seeing two little boys crossing the garden" David said. "Then next day you said you saw a little girl." Her story of the little clock - there it was on the picture rail next to the front windows - her grandfather's - that started to tick when he was in the hospital dying. She and Russell had had a pact, that whichever went first would try to get a message through. A couple of months after Russell died she and David and Marilyn and young Russell were sitting around the dining room table and the clock started to tick. How long did it go on I ask. Maybe half an hour.
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Louie got up this morning and scribbled in her journal, recording her bookwork and getting more. I wasn't impressed by what the book said, mostly, but I liked the feeling of signifying images being given, the opening of interest in being, daily and lifetime significance - something I used to feel more. Why is this writing so lumpy - I'm in a departure area now - both heavy bags got onto the conveyor - the customs officer took left and right finger prints and that must have been a camera - when he said what's the purpose of your visit, I said "I live there" - just am lumpy and don't know it when I'm writing my dumb flat sentences. I like the quiet of this high bright carpeted place. I like the flow of occasional strangers pulling their silently rolling black bags. The well-built cumulous I can see through the far side windows. The breezy hum of the moving sidewalk. Coming back to Tom in my blue sneakers, the washed jeans, the black shirt open to the third button, and one dolphin earring.
8 Dreamed Tom had been to a storehouse of my dad's and had helped himself to the wood sofa of my grandpa Epp and some bedding (my grandma's comforter). While we were standing in his place a beautiful young male UPS driver zoomed up, rushed in and Tom rushed to meet him, some game about spraying quickly into his letter pouch. When Tom was in the next room the driver looked at me the way a woman who loved him would look at a rival. Then Tom and he walked away together and I was trying to trail them to catch them at something. Some[thing about?] the bottom couple of inches of Tom's cargo pant leg. 9 There was swimming in that dream too. Narrow pool of water I could see a large fish in. When I went in it was too shallow. Good talk with Tom yesterday. He was straight up I think. I was watching a sharp faced silver haired man with cold eyes, cold bedroom eyes. We were talking about our dissatisfactions. He was saying this summer he wanted sex. He was on the beach and there were women so beautiful he hardly dared look at them. He was wanting to fuck any of them. Then he'd think about having to listen to stories about their cats. Having to go to their place, or bring them to his. Having to be clandestine, or else having to tell me "I'm going to have sex now." He suspects both of us want it but not with each other. Before we'd have it with each other there are resentments we'd have to let go of. I was saying I feel I can't be interesting with him, he isn't interested in me. He agrees he's self centred, that's what he's like, he's not nurturing. We look at breaking up. We both would like to be free to change, to have more happen. I say he could get lovers but I probably couldn't. Men my age repel me. He doesn't disagree. I say it would be tragic too. How, he says. I'm pausing. My eyes are wet. Because he's letting go of me and he's been the only person in my life who's wanted to hold onto me. His eyes get wet too. He says he would never abandon me. I saved his life. More than once. We rode the river together, you don't abandon someone you've ridden the river with. After a while I say it's clear it isn't about what he does with his house it's about whether there's contact or not. Later in the evening we were standing at the Cove in the dark, at the bottom of the steps with the tide crashing in, and he put his arm around me. I laid my head on his shoulder for a moment. That was the sweet spot in my day yesterday.
- In Santa Ysabel at the lunch counter Tom said of the fat old farmer sitting two seats down from a crony, That's Boss Hog. He picked me up at 8:30 to go to Carlsbad to look at a jeep. When he stands below and shouts up his shout has a declarative sound, I noticed. Ellie. He was looking quite peaky, he'd just got out of bed. We zipped up I-5. I had mapquested directions to the inland subdivision. Stopped at a Carl Junior's for Tom to get breakfast. Empty parking lot with bottlebrush trees. Sunday morning. California. We were early and pulled in at the triple gate facing back toward the road. There's your jeep Tom said after a while. A good dark red, nice later model rump. Clean cut young man driving it, straight back. Let's follow him in, I said. Nah, give him a moment to get inside, kiss his wife said Tom. I was antsy. We'll just wait 'til the end of this song, Tom said. I give it one more minute. I need to go now. Okay he says. We have conferred. He's going to stay in the car and read the Times. I cross the road to meet a young soldier, jarhead, nice looking, mild, smart. Hold out my hand. He's level and calm. I tell him about my old Cherokee. He's sympathetic. I say I have my little checklist and I'll just go through it, crawl underneath to look, and so on. I bounce the corners. Open the liftgate. Look at the spare. Look at the tread on the tires. Check the transmission fluid. Check the color of the oil. Check the level of the brake fluid (it's down). Look at the belt when it's running. Crawl underneath front back and side to look at the cat and the muffler, which is rusted. There's a leak on that thing that sticks down, big round thing. Say I'd like to take it for a drive, does he want to come? He says no. I drive it a block up El Camino Real, accelerate hard, brake hard, take my hand off the wheel to see whether it tracks. It does, perfectly. It's not as frisky as my Cherokee, doesn't have that light-footed frisky pick-up, doesn't have the same throaty growl. The controls are a bit flimsy, compared. It doesn't have a CD player, it doesn't have A/C. I don't mind the dents on the back fender. I'll be able to have a bike carrier because it has a trailer hitch. The color's wonderful. I tell him I like it but I'd want my jeep guy to look at it, especially because of the leak. His wife is beginning to chime in, I think she likes me. They say they can take it to PB. I'll have to find out when Bob can fit me in. I'll call them first thing Monday morning. Drive away with Tom. He had been proud of me. He liked the way I was standing with them, I looked young, he said. I had a good level gaze. He liked seeing me bouncing the corners and crawling under. We were halfway to country and kept going. Mountains planted in avocados to the top. Fruit stands. Then all of that thinned out and there were the real mountains with natural scatterings of trees. Tom was driving intently, his [rented] touring sedan. We came up over the ridge and into the golden valley where the wild oats this season are dark amber rather than palomino blond. The spread of the land, wide wide. At Dudley's bakery Tom wanted to spend money. He bought two bracelets and wore them both on his long thin wrist furred with copper and silver, a strong thin fur over his tan. Vain Tom. What is it about you and clothes. Driving along explaining your watch and your retro Nikes and your tan pants and grey teeshirt. "I'm bringing my wardrobe up a notch." So he brought me home on 8 and we kissed goodbye and I carried my groceries upstairs and here I am waiting for 9 o'clock so I can phone Robert's Automotive. 11 Dreamed I opened a large handwritten book, someone's notes. I was scanning because I knew I was dreaming and if I focused more I'd wake. It was a complex text, interesting, notes and observations, a bit alchemical. I was thinking I could revise my journal to be more like that. I assumed it was a man's. Later a moment listening to a woman teaching a man a song, or to sing. She was repeating a phrase in Latin. I was singing it quietly to learn it myself. She heard me, called me forward, asked me to sing the line. I heard it coming out of my mouth bright and clear. Then after a moment she burst into tears. I boldly put my arms around her while she cried - it was bold because she was the teacher. She stiffened at first but then she let go into it. I had my hand on her spine behind the heart, as if to infuse something into it. Then I rubbed it firmly. -
[list of Cherokee service totals from Nov 2003] 14 I often think about you Ellie, so beautiful with your flashing dark eyes. There was something so bright about you, you sparkled like you had an electricity about you the air around you almost used to crack. I used to tell my children all the tales you told me. - Jane Downey [notes on Craigslist Cherokee] 15
[list of what's needed to transfer automotive title] 16 Café Bassam at 8:30 Sunday morning. It has been two weeks. Good things: tax included, marble topped tables, wood chairs with arms, high ceiling and whole-wall windows, paintings and mirrors, full warming sun as of this moment, when it rose above the apartment building opposite. A piano. Things they need to fix: music too loud, no sofas, no newspapers, barista afraid to talk. How are things. 4 done, 4 more. Justin wanting dichotomy explained. Billy sent a sloppy screenplay he didn't know was that. I showed him specifics. He panicked. I wrote back nice. He came through, rightly said I'd held a mirror that showed him how much more he has to do. I found a lot to like in Betty's natural loving stories about living on the mountain above Ashville. Annie wrote well when she was raving and when she was writing in Woolf's aura, and badly when she was trying for fiction of her own - awkwardly, without rhythm to carry her ahead. Who I have left. Belle unrigorously going on about consciousness. I need to do philosophy with her. It will take a lot of time. Melanie so far my worst, inchoate. 'Poetry' without a single salvageable line, no ear. She says she wants to study 'schizophrenia, and mythology,' but in truth she's not capable of studying anything because what she actually wants is to break through with herself. She's G3, which is too late for what should have happened in G1. I don't know what to do with her. She wrote about Plath and misunderstood her, about Paz and couldn't touch him. Her journal was full of platitudes about how society is cut off from nature. Her plan is wrong. I should have caught it at the res, but I couldn't stand her, I suppose her anxiety, her voice, and her way of speaking always through a barred smile. David ignoring email, an attachment I can't open, a screenplay I suspect is plagiarized (is it?) because it is too finished. He may be in school for the loan money. And then Emilee, admirable Emilee. I think she may be the smartest student I've had, small plump wren, buxom, brown, hair in a bun, and inside that quiet oval watchful passion. She wrote considerate explanation for me and authoritative beauty for herself and sent me both. I read her in love and gratitude because she has been self responsible, she is not wasting my time or her own. She gives herself the challenge of meeting what she is not. She gives herself the food of the mouth. She is a companion to my extremity. She writes. She drinks. She wrote about her family and her job. (The company she works for is called Deep Blue. Her boss is a woman.) She wants me to know her but she isn't seductive. She's principled. Will I understand what she wants from me. Look at those fat croissants - It has filled up some since I've been here. Tom will be waiting for me and I don't want to see him today, I want another day like yesterday, working and private. I don't need his egotism and our repetitions. When we think of giving each other up we crack and are beautiful to each other but when we go on normally we fade into corruption. Nora's shining me on about the car. Yesterday when I was asleep in the afternoon I dreamed Judy drove into a parking spot with the slick sideways skid and swivel there is in a car ad I like. This morning I dreamed I was in the fields southeast of La Glace, northwest of the farm, looking for a route through. We were on a ridge looking over a vast marsh. Working on Emilee's letter I was feeling a tug to write that dream. 17th Almost done, just David left and then what - almost 2 weeks. Tom's scale last night 141, this morning 139. [Reading notes on Jeremy Narby 1999 The cosmic serpent and DNA, Tarcher/Putnam How medicinal properties of plants become known Invisible beings found in animals, plants, mountains, streams, lakes, certain crystals Can be seen if one ingests certain plants Hallucinogen composition usually resembles serotonin, fit into serotonin receptors as nonstandard forms He has an inner rep story about perception and so he thinks hallucinogens cannot just be "discharges of images stored in the compartments of the subconscious memory." I would say that what it means to say plants give knowledge is that they alter structure in ways that is both knowing and confusion. He talks about information in DNA rather than structural template.
Symbolism is always overdetermined, multiply determined. Blind spot about womb life.
Campbell "wherever nature is revered as self-moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life."
Establishing knowledge states (understood as communication with beings) through music - visual music
18 A young man I seemed to be being fixed up with. He was something like Portuguese, some kind of Mediterranean. Women in his family were doing the fixing. I seemed to be going along with it. He was sweet and friendly, quite small. I wanted his sister to understand how I might not be as suitable as she thought, I said there were two reasons. One was that I had my PhD. She left the room. I said to him in a perky friendly way we had seemed to have established, I guess she didn't want to know the second reason. Anything I can find in that. There's something I carried away about the sweetness of his young body, the sweet naturalness I felt in relation to him, mainly that. How irritating normal conversation with Tom is to me. I avoid it, don't look forward to it. How bothered I've been by just about anyone's conversation. Café Bassam. Bad music. I said turn it down please. Need to write my self evaluation, What is there to say about the last two semesters. Last summer to this summer. Summer res. What did I teach. Body & cosmos. That disaster of a colloquy. Then what did I do in winter. I hate this music. What do I actually think of my work - I've done these evals, I'm not interested in doing it again - I've been more bored, my students have been worse - I haven't had that lively collaboration with Lise - Anna, Carolyn, Layla, Juliana - Laura was spectacular - said some things to Jimmy that I needed to say - wrestled Kri interestedly - but wasn't everybody else a waste - Polly, Ian - Justin has been good but amazingly slow - Darlene a waste - Rachel didn't want as much challenge as she got - she would have liked to be praised more - I tried to hand on my framework, put a lot of effort into that with Jimmy and Kri and Laura - is that just preaching, because they can't use it? Will they find my letters are shoving my philosophy? As if really all I'm interested in is working it out for myself. No I should say what else I had to do. The way I try to unknot whatever is holding them. Try to show them their own strengths. I think my best quality is that I'm generous, I want them all to come along. I think my worst quality might be that I overestimate what they can do. Is that correct? An impatience probably. - I'm bored doing this - I'm not interested in evaluating myself generally, I do that particularly every moment when I'm writing the letters. I'm weighing, is this too direct, is this too ingratiating, is this seductive, is this too missionarizing, is this clear, is this correctly adapted to the student. I'm not interested in being evaluated either. I don't think my evaluators know more than I do, so it's pro forma. What would I be more interested in. Gossip? Someone talking to me in detail about the students and the letters, what they're about. Talk about advising, technical talk. What is it that's horrible about this music. It's European shmaltz, conventional - horns and strings. I like this space. I could bring ear plugs? Maybe it's the hardness of the room, concrete. Is there anything I'd rather talk about. This guy is gay and he's not smart, so I won't be able to persuade him. [Craigslist Cherokee notes] 19 A lot of dreaming. I was in a bed with Frank's younger brother. We were naked. There was a heap of some green paste on his left collarbone. I licked it. I was thinking we were going to poke but it turned out that he wasn't going to. I was hiddenly disappointed. I was in bed in a large square room in India that was full of cobras standing up quietly all facing the same direction. Later they were moving toward the door, not slithering but just sliding, still with their heads up. Some of them were slipping over my feet under a sheet. Outside I was standing with people looking at some kind of reptile that had the look of grey polished stone. There were several standing at the edge of a puddle. Young men energy, that's my body at the moment, my thighs in bluejeans. When I write notes on dreams I feel the futility. I am aware of the part of the narrative that is just the regular mind's rational puzzlement at its unlikely circumstance. That doesn't seem worth writing - the way the dream continues from some point is just rationalizations. What I want from the dream is what I can't get - usually it's to see the initial place again, to look around in it more. For instance that room in India, its wideness, the far windows curtained, the low furniture, and all those low quiet verticals at intervals like a field of rebar. What do I have to do - David, Justin again, 2 student profiles as templates, fac conf call at 4:30. Is there something I can want for myself. A friend. A new friend. Talk. Close talk, interested talk. Work talk. A work context. The way experimental film used to be. A context around perception and creation, that's about cosmos not people. Land and mind site? Make a context? Body as spirit lectures again with sky as part IV.
20 Sleeping this aft a flash dream of my mother holding a new-born baby. She is in the other room. I just saw the baby's naked legs and her midriff and arm. Yesterday at Tom's house I was telling him about Margo at the end of the conference call timidly saying she has decided it would be bad for the program to lose its leadership while it is still forming - in other words we should fight for her after all - Tom had tears in his eyes. He's interested in work politics. And then he described how she would fight - pad, pad, dab, pad, pad, dab. I was still laughing today. Working with students - diving to find the kernel - Melanie and Belle happy - Justin writing paragraphs I was trying to translate - in the effort I was feeling them a dark prickly bush with branches hooked onto each other. I couldn't get all the interrelations into readable sentences, so I was understanding his difficulty. Maybe it's dope. I got Melanie simplified to the hero's journey. She should have had better advising in G1 and G2. Belle liked what I sent but she hasn't actually understood it - I think - she wants an elaborate fantasy of consciousness. She's inchoate. She's uninformed. 21 Talking to Margo about getting fired. She's surprisingly defeatist. The most persuasive thing she heard from me was that this situation is like many and if we can't handle it we can't teach social change. The most direct exchange we had was when she said "Some of my faculty are smarter than I am" and I said "You think?" and she said "I think you are smarter than I am, and I think Karen Campbell is," and, pause, I said "I like your list." How does it feel after that conversation. A bit triumphant as if I dominated her when she's down. Could I have done that better. I said she shouldn't trust Francis's take on Mark. I said I'm not fond of the fac just now. I said they need to feel she'll fight. I said she needs to turn up the jets [energetically]. I said I'll go on saying what I've been saying in fac conversations but I don't want to take leadership on it because the leadership should come from her. I said it would be bad for us to roll over and that rolling over will not save the program - rolling over will make admin think they can get away with restructuring. I said she is the program and if she's going I should think of looking for a new job. She said she thought that's probably true, because if admin doesn't like TLA it likes embodiment studies even less. More? I said the coordinators, people who are already in charge of something, may imagine they could get to be in charge of the whole. She said they might not know that about themselves. I said yes, Francis and Ralph don't. I don't trust any of her negative assessments of possibility but I also don't know enough to be sure. Did I give away that I'm not speaking strongly enough? Am I waffling like they are? Did she think I am only supporting her because I think she's my only chance? - I don't. I asked why she gets along with us but not with higher ups. She said it has always been like that and she thinks it's because she's not deferential. She gets along well with confident administrators but not with anyone who has a weak ego. And also because as an administrator she isn't hierarchical. She said progressive colleges always have the difficulty that faculty are progressive and admin are hierarchical, it has to be that way to some extent. On the bike today in rolled jeans and the thin red hoodie looking at my shadow and seeing a slender person, slender back and shoulders, nice bump of a slender rear. Frisking with pleasure in how it feels to be that. Frisking on the bike, easily able to take the hill from the credit union without walking it. In the mirror in Café Bassam wise old lined face I like. What's the word. There is one. Earned. Formed. Buying Auto Trader, looking at Craigslist many times a day, considering the credit union buying program. Writing students to ask them for testimonial pages [for Margo]. Michael D, Gwen, Anna. 24 Lise reports that Susan is in love, stage manager at the Met. She's got New York. 25
- 1996 SE 4x4 4 dr 6 cyl 93k all records auto $3500 Rancho Mission Road "forest green" - looks like turquoise 28 Got up this morning and went into my business pile. Canadian taxes, BC Med, etc - and am noticing how surprisingly stressful it is. Why would body so mind it. Heart stress. Because it's technological, it says. And it's slow - there's a lot of waiting. Anxious. 29 Woke from a bad dream. It's 2 in the morning. It was something about a woman in a lab. Being hunted by a woman. I turned up a thermostat while people were fighting, she or someone had started a process that was going to take it to a disaster. I thought the heat might fix what was going to happen - I'm having trouble writing this, I took a hit last night when he doublecrossed me. It was an awful dream. I'm wondering whether I should back out of the deal also because I'm not sure of the color. This feels really bad. How. Heartsick.
30 Bought the jeep yesterday. Tired and sore this morning, didn't want to see Tom but said I'd pick him up to go to the farmers' market. Driving with him drained by his language, fucking everything. I said I didn't feel well and was going home. Weary of him, the repetition, his dependency, wanting to be praised always. When I was picking him up the phone rang. He walked across the room in his underwear. My eyes averted instantly, involuntarily. Today I was transcribing 1976, the months when I'd begun to keep company with lesbians. I was learning freedoms, I said. There was an earthquake during the night last night, the strongest I've
felt, but I forgot it today, until the news mentioned it just now.
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