| in america 14 part 2 - 2007 november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st November What I'm thinking when I wake - morose clear statements - this morning that there's no depth now in my relation with Tom, as if one or both of us have secrets. I don't want to push for more, I don't want to be more intimate with him. He's often asking me to praise him more, assure him. I evade. I don't want to leave him and I don't want to stay with him. He brings up sex, which I never do. He says he doesn't feel any interest in it but wonders whether I'm discontented because I don't have it. I don't say what I think, which is that neither of us want to be naked with the old bodies we have become. This summer when he was on beaches with young women he was longing to poke them: we had a real talk the first visit after I came back. I said I have to have more realness. He said he didn't want to be unfaithful but he wants to have sex. We were both in tears thinking of leaving each other. In that cracked-openness I had what I wanted, but then we went back to cozy domesticity and we haven't mentioned that conversation since. Last night it was a year since I moved him into 3663 Georgia. We were listing the year's gains and I noticed they were all his. Or that's how I was naming them because I wasn't saying mine, that I have somewhere to go that's an open space with plants, a sky view, an oven, good kitchen things, a mockingbird, a cricket, a warm body. Mostly arranged my way. A bathtub. So it's economic. He was making such spectacular money on the hoist that he could afford it and his months off work too. But have I managed him into providing for me? Is it actually good for him to be there? Would he be better as he was before? He's proud of himself for paying bills and having bank accounts. He says he sits down sometimes to write and looks up five hours later. He's eating better. He likes foreign movies, sat through something called Mongolian ping-pong with me last night. Rode 36 miles on his new bike yesterday. - See, we both have energy for his successes but even I don't seem to have energy for mine, except for losing 15 pounds and getting that much younger, which I have endless joy about. - Forgot to say he's a feminist now, he likes the women commentators on politics shows and he notices when his guys are unconsciously misogynous. He has his intelligence back and he still has lovely bursts of fantasy, last night one about how a Taurus and a fish get along. He doesn't rage any more. - He's wonderful in fact, so why am I discontented? Because I'm not opened up. Does getting along with Tom depend on being shut down? It says no. But something does. I've never had this circumstance before.
2 Emilee's story: I go down to the well the place where I dip into cold, clear darkness. He had cut his lips, a dozen tiny cuts that bled in comic rivulets between his teeth and down his boy's chin. "You are Emilee for Everybody" he said. "You must be so fucking proud." It was already snowing and he stood there ... He stood in the middle of the street with his hand over his heart. Warm light. Soft eyes. Well used hands. Discerning mouth. Well placed between earth and sky. Steeped. Green and gold and white and brown and skin under the sun. Comforting. Invigorating. Challenging. Complex. A mix of water and earth and warmth and steam. Infusion. Emilee is a writer, has been from 14 if not before. She's a pleaser too, more than I am. Is that going to work for her. Being an outsider like I am is not the only way. But is she weak-headed theoretically. She has believed a lot of men. The men she's mentioning are terrible: Crowley, Tom Robbins, that other guy, science fiction poser, Robert Anton Wilson. She doesn't seem to have run into women's culture. She was ready to cut off what she thinks of as her body, sexual need. Why was that? She describes me as a body, she sees. Casual drugs all the time, Ambien and pot, now. They increase perception but keep it from integrating, is that it? Integrating with what? Theory. Her story is amazingly strong and relevant. Could she really tell it. She'd be talking for many. If she could really say what drugs are and what boy and girl are - she could honor what he was, which is extraordinary. He gave her his extreme realness of male vulnerability. She would have to tell it so it remains ambiguous whether she was using him or whether she was his victim. The parable she wrote at 15, of herself turning into a dragon: that was very strong. She's less strong in it now I think. The man she wants now and how clearly she is writing him. Where I see the balance, I think she has come through whatever her mixing was, going with Joel into wildness and then Buddhist discipline. At the same time her social accommodations of people who wouldn't like to see how much smarter she is. - I'm in Café Bassam with paper napkin stuffed in my right ear and holding the other shut with my left finger. Bassam has come back and has cranked the volume, it's Piaf and strings. What makes this music so bad. It's nationalistic sentimentality, the kind of emoting that feels good to people who normally don't feel. Overblown conventionality. Republished story from the Reader Feb 27 1986, Gordon Smith "The oak lady." Woman living in Escondido describing Halley's comet 1910. For months before the comet arrived, people were predicting it would bring about the end of the Earth, and in her eight-year-old girl's mind Ryan found the predictions entirely plausible. The night the comet finally came was unforgettable. She tossed and turned in her bed, waiting for the moon to turn blood red and Satan to begin pounding on his loathsome anvil, as the seers had promised. In the middle of the night her father woke her and led her and the other children downstairs and onto the back porch. With a feeling of overwhelming relief, Ryan discovered that the infamous death star was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen - "It lit up the entire eastern part of the sky, from Devil's Anvil to Bottle Peak, and you could see stars shining through it." 3 I came with earplugs this morning but it's not bad. Beatles covers not too loud. Having to write res lecture blurbs. Will do Theory because it's the program review and it will make M happy. And then will do two sessions of Spirit as body and see if I can work it as an example of a challenge to a theory. Theory revision, paradigm revision.
Mention Spirit as body II, mention that it's scary because it cuts to the bone. The question is whether feeling for, knowledge of, actual universe can fill the role religion used to. Teaching philosophical heuristics - new motions of thought (what is philosophy - metacognition - troubleshooting). About the sky - theory and experience - we've evolved to be related to it - small animals' fear and awareness. - Quite wired by this day - [college] business all day puts my blood pressure up extraordinarily - I'm assuming the pressure in my chest is that - a hyped edgy feeling. A lot of email, editing two new testimonials pages, and fixing a couple, corresponding about them - mid-semester check-ins this morning - I couldn't handle installing First Class on a disk - when I phoned the library to get a ref for The sky bibliography waiting on the line was amazingly stressed though it wasn't long, waiting and machines. Machines I'm not used to? Any waiting. But sitting in Bassam's working on the sky session was the opposite, free motion, easy pleasure. 5 Black Canyon Road yesterday. It is completely burnt. Off Mesa Grande Road there's one finger of the Witch Creek fire that almost reaches, we could look down into it, black and ashed. And then on Black Canyon Road the main burn area begins in the oak grove before the track begins to drop. And then except sometimes a small streak of color along the creek, land burnt completely naked. Boulders graphite-colored, dirt red, yellow or buff in the cuts and elsewhere grey. No manzanita, ceanothus. Not one stalk of white sage on the roadside. We stopped halfway down. I was sitting on a bank of earth looking across at a whole naked mountain. Two hawks were drifting over nothing edible. Silence. The air's perfect touch on my arm, warm, slight. Graphite, buff, that pale fox-red. Single black skeletons of shrubs. Slight smell of smoke, nothing aromatic. Took the jeep to Robert's Automotive today, first time. When I drove away I was wanting to stomp down on the gas and race. What is that. Gives me joy to take care of it. Blood pressure cuff back from repair.
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Buddhist sky TSK [Tarthang Tulku Time, Space and Knowledge] encounter a deep and expansive sky investigate the body-mind-thought interplay constituting a human being a knowingness in touch with the total phenomenon of human embodiment a presence within space Exercise 15
Upgrade for Final Cut Pro - Final Cut Pro HD? Dave writing the Grande Prairie community college to suggest having me as speaker next fall. Five and a half weeks between semesters. - Finished transcribing [In America] 13 - this one is 14. Justin was mad at me and sent me a note more lucid than usual which has made me furious. 7 Little Rubio's while I wait for Bob to fix my seat belt latch. It's the top end of Mission Bay Drive where it's car dealerships, where are these scruffy people coming from. Two things this morning. The most significant is that I phoned a transfer house in LA and someone's going to email me a quote. Do I want high def or standard def she asks. Tell me how much storage I'll need I say. The other is that I was working on the index page for DR, writing about 820A and the neighbourhood, being an artist in 1975. How Vancouver seemed to me when I came. - Email from Laiwan February 9-ll I'm on a film program in Berlin. 8 Notes in origin. Formatting the early Cheryl pages this morning noticing how much the story is a story of reading. When I fell in love with Cheryl it was science fiction and The Sufis. The dispossessed. Dune. I was ready to write them off but I am seeing the shift was real. Will need to see how.
Funding - want to make all of this pay for itself Figure out how to do taxes Books 9 The tea twins have twin vélos parked outside their store, one green, one cream, bright and new. Justin complained to Margo, a letter going over every move of our last couple of exchanges. What's my conclusion. He's helpless. I can't be giving him my days between packets. Our conversation isn't working. He's not more confused than he was but his confusion is more apparent.
I wanted to give him a framework because I thought he was getting it, I thought he'd see that it works. This semester I've seen nothing from him but struggle to articulate two or three ideas. When I snapped about his esoteric terms and he stopped using them his confusion got more visible. Did it get more visible to him? If I can't understand it I can't comment on it, I can't evaluate it. He demanded too much. I got exasperated. He was hurt, he retaliated. I snapped. What should happen now. Look at his study plan. Think what he can salvage of his semester. Is he complaining to forestall getting flunked by putting doubt on me? smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now. Alexander McCall Smith 2001 Morality for beautiful girls Anchor 10th Why has the barista just brought me a pastry puff? "You have to try this. It's a pastry puff." And what am I going to do with it? She was young and she was excited to give it to me, had drizzled raspberry syrup over the powdered sugar. I didn't say no. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. Coleridge meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. When one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas ... one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy ... their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature. In a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error. Here I'm crying in Café Bassam because she mentions me, says she wants me: By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle ... to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship and philosophy and science. When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear. I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. And there I cry again, when she says: Now my belief is that this poet still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many women who are not here tonight for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while. All of this in chapter 6. if we face the fact that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women It's Saturday midday. There's a palm's leg next to the light pole. Clean sky and offshore breeze. Between times. Packet 4's coming in for Monday. I didn't want to touch them but I woke too early and can't do anything of my own. Tom tomorrow. 11 Took the pastry puff with me and left it on the homeless man's chair. He was on his pad under the stairs completely covered with a blanket. He doesn't usually sleep in the daytime. Tom has given me his second-hand Carhart jacket, since he bought a new one when he knew he was going back to work. This one is - grey? Brownish-grey? A thick cotton with a nap. Windbreaker. I look nice in it. It has a mickey pocket and is quite long, like the cream-colored Nordstram jacket I found in my office at SFU and lost. Bought a G3 last night from Jorge Ruiz of TJ. $200. It has added memory and is running OS10 so it can handle Java. There's a red-headed green hummingbird clicking at my salvia. On Craigslist there it was. I sent an email. Last night I met Jorge at Café Bassam. Rode up on my bike and there was a tall Mexican with a baby face and a pencil moustache. He's an architect he says. Anyway that was as easy as it's possible to be. My old one is freezing a lot, cutting web connections, humming louder than before. The keyboard is beat-up from all those volumes of Work & days. On the thick wire a slender dove that has pulled its head down into its shoulder in very weak sun. The leaves on the sycamore are now completely dry. Whoo-om the hummingbird cuts down from the feeder overhead. There it sits twitching its little head on the snag. I can hear Tom rustling the paper inside. I'm happy about the computer, relieved, and more happy because I've been working on Dames rocket this week, writing the index page text, and this morning I wrote the film and photos section and the writing section and finished the intro. I am happy saying that confused time accurately. compactly. I'm happy feeling a filmmaker again. Tried to phone Rowen to borrow his camera to take pictures on Black Canyon Road. Excited. The pink vine geranium is growing through to this side of the wire. It's a perfect pink, lighter toward the edges of the petals. Wooly lamb's ears under it. 12th Yesterday watched the Chargers game with Tom. I now understand what a down is. Have seen some beautiful poses. Cromartie - don't know that I can describe this - leaping high, very high, and slanted, so his whole body feet to extended right arm was a tight 45 degree slope hung in the air while he closed his hand around the ball. Behind him was the Cubs receiver with his hands low in position to catch what would now never arrive. Last game it was Tomlinson diving at knee-height through a big pile-up on the goal line to plant the ball very precisely, at the full extension of his arm, nose down just over the line for a hand-made touchdown. The camera coverage is remarkable. Tom was as focused as I ever see him, following what is very dimly visible to me, downs and yardage, fouls, penalties, the possibilities of a play. This morning going home on the bus I found a Union somebody had been using to sit on at a bus stop - it rained last night - and I read about the game on the sports pages. What impressed me was how much tracking there is of everyone's performance, all the numbers, everyone knows exactly how good they are in one game, in a season, in a career. Accomplishment is unambiguous. In art the scoring systems aren't reliable, I was feeling. 13 Sunday I weighed 138 and yesterday my jeans were loose. Today they're tight - what is that. Eggplant parmesan last night, maybe it had crumbs on it. My muscles are stinging. Was there more I wanted to say about Tom on the weekend. He had worked all day Saturday so I showed up Sunday morning. I liked him better since he's working. The men on the job praise him and he's not as lonely and clingy. I was excited and talked away and his eyes glazed over some but I kept going. He was handsomer, and less worried since the VA nurse said he's okay. I was doing what I sometimes do, spacing on his thinking and just saturating in the sound of his voice. Abba in French - it's the worst song he has and I hear it almost every time. Programs that haven't transferred to OS10 - Photoshop, Quicktime, Stuffit expander, Realplayer, Word, Explorer. 14 Writing DR intros this morning. Came to something written earlier, I don't know when, about that time. It was single lines with two spaces between them, lower case. Coming into it was a shock. It said what I wanted to say in such a better state. It's spacious, airy, and it made me instantly as if fold up and go away. It's a good state but does it scare this one, which is more pedestrian? Emilee's packet. She's in love with her brother in law and 'married' to a woman who describes herself as having 12 personalities, earlier 40. What I felt reading her packet is the way she's adventurous like me, she's curious about the possibilities of being. She says she's afraid to trust her own opinions in academic work and yet she's intrepid with drugs and gothic dark states. How does that work. She likes bad writers like Tom Robbins and repulsive ones like Crowley. Also good ones like Leonard Cohen. She's reading Chaos with pleasure. What do I want to know about her. Is her liking true or does she butter everyone. My guess is she butters everyone and her liking is true. I think that because of the bits she quotes back to me. This packet had letters in it to and from the man she's excited about. Neither his to her or hers to him are as alive as ours are - I mean she doesn't write as well in them. She's hyping him. [2 pages of tech notes about high def] 16 Working with the Dames rocket page of summary statements about the mind of the time - I needed a lot of focus to put the statements into an order. It's work I'm frail in, I'm not easily holding the parts known in a whole - is that the way to say it - bluntly - what I'm seeing is a transparent medium I was moving something in, moving something also transparent - something like that. It's hard to do, I shy from it, want to go away. There's a grasp in these little lines that I don't have in the journal of that time. The lines say what I was doing, what was happening with a precision that the drugs ruined in writing. Not only drugs, that's one of my questions - thinking this section is the trickiest, I have most to do in it, blending that time with this one - not only drugs because I opened abandonment and then went into defensive scrambling. I didn't know how to work with it. I saw, I think I saw, I'll check, that when I cut my hair they abandoned me, I had my balance until then, and that's when I got bumped into inferiority. It's painful to see. What else is painful to see is that from the moment I meet them Luke disappears from the journal, I don't see him any more. With Paul, Maggie and Nellie I'm alive to him, and then I'm swept into an underworld of self-absorption and obsession. I was simple before I went there - vital - not even artistically inferior though I think of myself as that - because I made Trapline - but my writing was inferior - and my photos were. How could I make Trapline and still write so falsely, do you understand that? It was because of London, London made Trapline. I cut my hair because it was giving me false power with them. It was courageous and honorable. And then I took what followed. Defeat, humiliation. Those are not small words. Later Jam took me there again. The first time I volunteered, the second I didn't. Trudy manipulated her into it, not to harm me, but for her convenience. I got even and then the cycle was done. Did I get even with them? Yes when I read what will we know.
Last night after work, after dark, I was needing to go shopping and thought I'd visit Tom for a moment - little surge of happiness - drove to his street, parked - it's 5:30 but he isn't home from work yet - I use my key - turn on his lights - look around - there's his morning in the room, sheet in a bundle in the middle of the mattress, pyjama pants on the little table with his jar of cashews, coffee spilled on the stove. I make his bed, wash his plates, put things away, wipe the floor. Will I wait for him. No, I'll leave it clean and lit up for him. Start Nora Jones and lock the door after me. Go to Whole Foods and call him when I get home. He tells the story. He was coming down the stairs thinking, did I leave the bathroom light on? He'd had a hard day, had worked 'til 6. Stepping into a lit clean room with Norah Jones hit him with bliss. The first thing he did was check which track it was - it was only the third. He sat down and let the day go, he felt loved. He said, the only thing missing is Ellie. Then he said no, that would have spoiled it. He told me the story from his most natural easy self, the one we have gradually rescued. Guggenheim application by Ed Dalpe. Note from Amanda, who has left Sequoyah which may mean she has left heroin. 17 Wrote Emilee this morning. Sat down to it first thing and looked up finished at 12:30. Oh that's why I'm hungry. Anything special? Figured out how to tell her not to buy the multiple personality story, tried to intimate what the Buddhists should say, if they don't. That some mind is deluded, and the discourse about consciousness is, and the I that identifies with consciousness rather than the body is. There can be identification without an observer conceived of as separate.
I said she's timid academically and bold in drugs and emotional adventures, and why is that. She wants to do a project interviewing people and I say marketing research on other people is fine but where is her writing strongest? Her amazing story of challenging Crowley and being raped by him in a dream and feeling herself larger. I saw that what she was looking for was power. License to power. She doesn't want to harm. She can have it in writing. She shouldn't go into service.
Café Bassam 4:35. When I walk out of the house I want to suddenly be somewhere. There's pink winter light, and gold in the west. A piano sounding, a real piano not a recording, in a small house. From this corner I can see up Redwood to the park, where the sky is vivid tinted depth between the eucalyptus trees, flushed palest blue above the clubhouse roof. Crows flying home the same way they fly in Vancouver, southeast. A smell of iced doughnuts. Across the street a building with a long grid of mirrored glass across half a block, 3 squares high, 38 along. A thin black frame. Continuous across it now an image of the sky in the west, pale silver blue, washes of palest flamingo pink. The blue has risen among the drooping eucalyptus. The pink that has risen above it is suggesting grain. Cream-colored walls in winter light. The palms on Olive are showing fine fresh pale antlers. Men with dogs on leashes. Smell of coffee roasting. Bassam bringing out a cake on a glass cake stand. His place. He has a good name. A Levantine. Not sure what that is. The streetlight just came on. I noticed because palm frond shadows moved across the page. There's one directly in front of the lamp. The music is a bit oceanic today. I used to be so likeable. Now people at parties look away - they did at Nora's gallery event last night. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. It was the time between lights when colors undergo their intensification ... when for some reason the beauty of the world is revealed and yet soon to perish - but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want - not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love. the forest is the place where things begin to turn and grow again; it is a healing regression ... it seems as though only nature in its virgin beauty and essence has the power to heal in such a case. 97-8 A woman who has such a father has not been nourished by his eros function. In our story the daughter shows that such a woman is sold to the devil, which would mean that, since she was not nourished on the feeling side, a destructive, devilish intellectualism, a devilish animus of some sort, will take possession of her. She will either be very ambitious or very cold, or she may do the same thing as her father, continuing his life pattern in the calculating, cold way of her animus. The girl in the story reacts in a very typical way to such an inheritance by realizing that there is this negative possibility and trying to keep herself out of the terrible danger. 89 Von Franz The feminine in fairy tales Francis sends information he got on the web about [college president] Mark Schulman's salary. 2005-06 $239,000. More than ten times what I get. 20 Rowen is coming with Robert Dec 4-9 and bringing the camera. I've been forgetting to say there is a cricket at Tom's house that sounds in the evenings. It's all alone. Its small serrated voice (I know it's not a voice) sounds regular as a little clock from a particular spot in the honeysuckle on the railing. If it hears my footstep it freezes, so then I have to listen without moving until it continues, take one step, and wait again. I'm fond of it. It was there louder and longer in summer but now even though it can be cold at night and it's sounding a bit frail, it hasn't gone. Got the first CVD Studio Pro book. Turns out I have DVD Studio Pro 4. But oh dear today my Mac Book won't locate the external drive though the G3 does - barely. Was studying how to make DVDs and it's easy after FCP. I've been ghosted today by a dream about Alex last night - it was her - she offered to let me stay in her cabin and I was looking through the rooms. Her roommates didn't want me there - hadn't known she had roommates. Left. Walked through a village - seemed east coast. What has kept me feeling it today was somehow the place, unusual realness. [pages of notes on DVD Studio Pro] 22 People coming to my index page by googling my name - Facebook profile, Senses of Cinema, [the college].edu, bookmark. For Work & days 5 bookmark, 2 beautiful-fierce, 20 index, 5 internal, 3 by name. Thanksgiving dinner with Tom at the Antique Row Café in Pacific Heights. 23 Dreamed I turned on the radio and heard Jam's voice in some production on PBS. There might have been three women's voices all with a dark quality but in different modes - one was operatic singing, one maybe a dramatic stage actress - I'm filling in here- at the time it was just heavy dark voices I could sometimes hear Jam's among - this was from an old-fashioned wooden floor radio at night. There had been something before where I was showing someone a little drawing of Michael's head up in the corner of a printed sheet - I handed it to them and the drawing turned into a lurid little photo - was wondering whether the drawing was still there on the other side of the paper - the drawing was my style of drawing with few lines. Later I was in a room with two men in the dark and one of them dropped a spark off his cigarette that started a small fire on the floor. He patted it out but not long after there were flames from under the floor, large flames, and in the adjacent building too. Everyone seems to be just standing and looking. I don't want the building to burn because I would lose the possibility of finding more art I'd forgotten about. It's still dark in the building, I'm walking around in the other room looking at the flames under the first, saying aren't there any extinguishers. Writing this dream I notice the way the dream is built event by event, the cigarette spark to the larger fire is not causal but thematic - and the way the dreamer's thoughts are commentary on dream events as if they were real - not themselves dream. Later I was at a university and saw interesting people going to an event along an exterior corridor like SFU's. Then there was Jam. I say I heard her on the radio. She's here for a presentation about the production she was in. She asks what I thought of it. We're sitting on a step in the room with the gathering. That must be her girlfriend standing against the wall, a short-haired tall dyke. I say I missed most of it, but there seemed to be three voices in completely different registers. She wants to go somewhere else and talk about it. She's gone ahead of me up some bleachers, where is she - I'm noticing succulent plants growing in cracks between boards - a rosetted flat plant - the word saxifrage is coming up though I don't know it was that. Then there is Jam standing higher wearing a costume I can now see. It's like a saxifrage, petalled all over, with some of the petals standing and some lying flat - petals standing along the outline - it's beautiful and interesting, I could say Shakespearian, like a Puck, a cross between a jester and a petalled reptile. She had seemed to be saying the production was something about Medea. Saxifrage stone-breaking, puck an evil sprite OE, Medea a sorceress who helped Jason get the fleece. 24 Saturday. Starbucks at University and Park. Tom's at work. I have the day. Nora's building closed up for termite tenting next door. Clear sky. Jacaranda feathers on the street trees. There was a cold Santa Ana last night, the air is unusually clear. Last night a full moon standing almost overhead, shining blue on the checkered floor. I'm transcribing the year between meeting T and C and starting with Jam, into the second half of it. It's not exactly what I thought. I come apart and then get focused again. Cheryl is tight and mean - why am I so stuck on her - Trudy's generous so far - why am I so stuck on Cheryl. 26 Ellie's overall contributions to the IMA program are exceptional. While she tends to shun traditional front and center leadership roles, her perspective, her philosophy, has, like a broad and deep running river, had a determinative influence on the landscape of the program. Her introduction and articulation of theories of embodiment have gone from something I found perplexing to a way of thinking that influences the way I do psychotherapy, the way I am in the world, and the way I reflect on myself and my experience I look forward to advising students who have studied with Ellie, because they often have a freshness to their work and a new way of seeing things. To maintain a clear artistic and philosophical vision, Ellie is one who tends her own garden. In that sense she is not a 'joiner' for the sake of being part of social activity, but is deeply and personally present with her students. - Jim I intended to just scroll through Ellie's letters but instead spent several days absorbed in them. They are long, dense letters and for me they were full of revelation. I don't know when I have ever encountered, in combination, this degree of clarity, care with language, and philosophical rigor. Revelation, illumination, tranformation, were themes that ran through Ellie's students' evaluations. "I have come away deeply changed." "She managed to ask big questions about my work that were exactly the ones that needed to be asked." "Usually when I got a comment from her it was like having that light bulb moment of aaah yes." Many remarked on Ellie's intuition - 'uncanny' wrote one student - and wisdom. - Lise Last night I had a pang about whether Jim would say I'm too hard on Jimmy Rose, and then I thought - it means Jim has sent my peer eval. This morning when I got home it was there. Best moment in the weekend lying in the dark heads together Saturday night. I called him on something and he stayed talking in the dark for longer than he usually does and it was an actual good talk. I had the blind up and the big night sky was alongside my bed. Tom was talking about the person behind, who is critical and who manipulates the person in front who is more able to.... "Get along" I say. "Yes." It began when I stared into his face and saw sheer strangeness and said so. He was confiding and I was wanting it to stop. I was liking it but finding it a strain. [page of tech notes including telecine labs]
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