| in america 14 part 5 - 2008 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7 January A storm of wind last night. I could see the palms thrashing in the dark. This morning branches torn from the Cleveland sage downstairs. Clean grey air in the street when I went down in my pyjamas to fetch tea from the jeep. Jane Eyre on PBS. Lazy speech anachronisms but Jane played by the right sort of person, and Rochester too. She had a very long upper lip and an unattractive profile. Her face held. He was more boyish than I have imagined Rochester, like Hugh Grant with a lot of hair, but he had the right feeling impetuosity. There was a scene where we saw them side by side on the grass, two profiles. It was the sight of friendship. Convincing: these two people had found each other. I was reading it as a man with unredeemed feeling meeting and instantly recognizing passionate rectitude, something he could be. Miss Ingraham is his flirtation with cynical dissociation. He is a man with a lot of books - magnifying glasses - globes. She standing in his library looking at a natural history book. She is an artist, he a traveler, and they walk out in the world together. Scenes where they talk by the river. At the end a scene added in the adaptation. They are sitting for their portrait - it's another anachronism, a portrait painter would not assemble a group on the lawn as if they were having a picture taken - and there she is with a more flattering hairstyle in charge of servants and all else, flourishing with a two-year-old on her lap. He says "Where's the baby." Something about just that. What this adaptation left out was Jane's voice, which makes all of it Jane. "Reader, I married him." There was some of her cadence but she is not the encompassing accomplishment Bronte's voice makes her. The way the magazine this time is about women meeting wildness in the form of boys or men. First Emilee and the stringy dirty boy who cut his lip with a razor blade when she kissed someone in a play: "a dozen tiny cuts that bled in comic rivulets between his teeth and down his boy's chin." Stacey meeting the devil in Moscow. Becci's brother and her dad breaking down. Margi writing as a twelve year old about loving a boy. Then Melanie explaining Von Franz on the devil as animus possession. Then Ian honestly telling his effort to meet wildness on the camping trip. Then Belle's meditation notes, which take her to a state in which she feels herself a god. Then Kri on attacking and being attacked by a man in aikido. "True stories and true names unfolding within me; me, letting them come." Then Anne Smith quoting Butala, who sees her husband "asleep on the ground with his animals" and then saying "desire and passion, weaving together to create a self." "This monumental work of self-creation." At the head of it all Polly Raine's image of a tiny woman nesting in leaves and twigs. Seeing Tiptree notes this morning I thought I could do a workshop on women sci fi writers. The magazine is good. No one is writing about it. I've published good stuff. Working on the Orpheus notes feeling Leslie Freeman - feeling whether to write her and invite her to work with me.
- Trying to get the new computer online - had to write Jorge to ask for a password. On the phone with La Cie trying to get the MacBook to recognize the external drive. That was all aft. It's 7 at night and I haven't got dressed yet. Cooking fish and vegetables. Finished transcribing DR7 which was the first summer up north and then back in Van. Now a short vol 1977-78 Oct-Feb. Then the vol with the Olson house, mostly already transcribed, 1978-79 Feb-Jan. Then the vol where I move into the lake house, 1979 Jan-July, transcribed, and then 1979-80 July-Feb also transcribed. So this little stretch will take me to 1980. I'm saying so because I want the transcribing over - it doesn't fund itself with pleasure. Earlier working on Orpheus notes though not very energetically. Hillary vs Obama tomorrow, she isn't going to make it. For a good reason or bad: I don't like his ranting. It's old fashioned preacher demoguery. I don't hear actual common sense. I don't like his pinched purple-lipped little face. But people like his oratory maybe enough to get him elected. Hillary is my age and there she is a bit dumpy in spite of all money and intelligence can do. She has played the game and it somehow shows. Is that what it is? She's doing what she has to do but the fact that it's visible is damning her. She'd be a good president, much better than Obama. She's by far the best candidate but that isn't going to be what matters. I'm saying that in the discouragement of my own case. People are ashamed of Iraq and they want to be proud of electing a black president. They don't want to be proud of electing a woman - that isn't how it works. 8 Mac genius tomorrow at UTC - MacBook and La Cie, G3 and password, buy another La Cie. Friday - LA on the 7.05 train from Old Town arrive around 10 - Red Line and bus to Burbank - arrive 11.10 - appointment at 1. Sylvia will sell a DVD to SFU for 600, Notes in origin, advance me the money. 9 Hillary won in New Hampshire. She was on TV in a beautiful tapestry jacket soft and real saying New Hampshire had given her her own voice. I think she means the interview the previous day, where she welled into tears talking about wanting to salvage the country. Hideous John Edwards immediately jumped on that clip, said a president can't be weak. This morning a woman voter interviewed saying she was undecided until she saw Hillary in tears. "I didn't see it as weakness, I saw it as passion." Women voted for her 46% to 37% for Obama. - At Bassam's Leo Finegold who is 80 and looks 65, joined the army at 17 out of New Orleans, taken prisoner in Germany in 1945, liberated a month later by the Russians. 10 Mac genius bar at UTC - I was there with the MacBook Pro and my two G3s and my external drive. The big computer wasn't recognizing the La Cie. My second G3 had a password problem so I couldn't get it online. My old G3 is giving me a message about memory - ie it is dying. I had lugged in all that hardware and had it spread out on the bar. In the end, the MacBook is at the shop for repairs that will cost $320, the G3 password problem is fixed but at the cost of wiping the OS so now I don't have the option of 9.2 on it any more, and all the set up work I did on it is gone; AND now I can't read the external drive, hangs up when I try. That may be because as I was loading up all the computers plus two bags of groceries I overbalanced and fell so the computer bags hit against the sidewalk. And tomorrow going to LA with two films and the new hard drive. Feeling the fragility of computers, jeep-body, new patches of decay on my teeth. The stress of this new project - the stress of the expense, the stress of learning new machines and software, getting them to work. This 1977-78 vol isn't as frantic and abstracted. Transcribing it I felt for a moment the air of myself at that time - unsayable except that it's light and poised more than earlier and more than now. Sylvia about the DVDs - thinking about jacket material. What should be the photo - needs to be something there can be print over. Blurbs, about the filmmaker, about the project. - All day scratching in past times. Question about DR - why do I think of the lake house as the core of my life. 1979-81. I was 35. I made myself in relation to a place. It was a mythic zone. The house was right, the yard was right. Now I want to give an account of it. I want to make Notes in origin the show. It needs a lot of money. Cost it.
I found my way into a state of beauty. That's the point. The work will evoke it. 11 Amtrak, passing the marsh north of Oceanside. I liked opening the door this morning on a milky dewy dawn and going downstairs to find the taxi at the curb. And now the humming glide above cliffs with glassed-off waves below. Surfer cars with their hatches up. A simple, silent ocean. Sand, foam. Sweet pink light. Simplest two foot waves rising to green. There was a dolphin's black fin. - Smoke House Restaurant, Burbank. Modern Videofilm Services building across the street. I was on Hollywood Boulevard staring at LA - tacky dirty Hollywood Boulevard. 12 Justin's new version correctly and quite beautifully proposes he'll look at A vision and antitheticality. I went online to find a definition and discovered myself happy in Yeats. Temperamentally opposed streams in western culture. Aristotle vs Plato - each of them founded on different dichotomies. An antithetical view would be antithetical within either. I Ching interpretations have two temperamental streams - the I Ching itself has structural contrasts. A right contrast would be I Ching interpretation vs interpretation of some text in a western canon. Art vs science, Renaissance to Englightenment Orthodoxy vs mysticism - Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Romantics, Yeats Authoritative order vs individual instinctual order I Ching literature doesn't have that dynamic, Chinese culture doesn't have it. A bodily energetic economy Oppositional/alternate vs antithetical now: art plus science, mysticism plus orthodoxy New notion of order [etc - trying to work out Justin's thesis] What do I love in Yeats - his sentic lyricism - his beauty and defense of beauty - mythic feeling - Greek and Celtic.
[Spirit as body IV The sky notes] So I'm back from LA with DVDs, Notes in origin and Current uncompressed in high def in the drive and an HD Cam tape, half of the digitizing is done, cost of about $1455-300 for the sale to SFU = 1155. Sylvia may or may not get me more sales. I can use the HD to make a deluxe HD collected works for income later. Maybe -400 for fac devel = 755. Doing the same for Trapline and Bright and dark will be more because of the sound, say $1800. Then I need a bunch for expert scans of 30 slides. And cassette. And reel-to-reel. And then there is politics - Sylvia - CFMDC - Canyon - Women make Movies. 14 Tom's house, Monday morning, 6:23. January dawn through the French doors. Hot cup of tea. There goes a crow across the yellow. Was there a best moment of the weekend. Saturday night I was lying next to Tom watching cariboo with the head phones on and he turned his head against my shoulder and fell asleep. It's windy this morning. The tall vertical limbs of the eugenia are bitty black lace panels nodding across each other back and forth. The refrigerator motor starts up. What it was like to read the first Fading vol intros over Tom's shoulder last night. He wasn't saying what he actually thought and by the second page he was skimming the parts that weren't about him. I was feeling doubtful of them in a way I never do, as if I could see how this and that are false. Full daylight. Saturday night eating at Denny's I told Tom the story of LA, from Thursday before leaving to the taxi coming home, with a lot of technical detail about the lab. I knew he was interested. He could see it. As I'm writing this I'm wondering what has happened to journal writing. For one thing, there's the way I have no impulse to write anything about LA. For another there's the dullness of the writing. How do I feel about the flat sentences I know they are. It's my structure isn't it: I'm not what I was, I'm damaged. I'm dying. Now a bird singing persistently and a hot zone of sky behind the eugenia where just now I see the sun rising quickly. There it is. - Somebody in Hunan, China - Changsha - got to me by searching SFU for epp. I don't think they meant me. Yesterday someone in Michigan who got in from Senses of cinema spent 35 minutes, and someone in Richmond BC spent 4 in Work & days. - My MacBook returned. They took out the added memory and it's fixed, it recognizes the drive. Now my second G3 hangs up and its little mirror ball spins on and on. I can't get it to go direct to mail, it has no 9.2 and so no programs I need. Won't find the La Cie. And the Mac Pro 1) has no modem for land line and 2) won't connect wireless here. So I have three computers and no complete system. - It's after 5, orange in the west. I'm rag-tag today, shouldn't have stayed at Tom's last night. Drinking real tea to try to get a mind. What do I want. Work. What are the parts of preparation.
7. social recovery
16 Working on Tenuous body: the sky this morning. What do I know - it's loose - make it loose - demonstrate adoration and connection, early love integrated with theoretical knowledge.
5. Indecision, skill, male betrayal
6. Balance the subtle oppression of love woman
18
It's cold. Friday morning. Cold sun. Excited, somehow things to do, but all of them good things. - I think the new G3 is alright - a man in an office full of old Macs got 9.2 onto it, with all my programs and files. I can still have the desktop I like. I'm telling this because it's the accomplishment of the day. - And secured Final Cut Pro and DVD Pro, opened Notes in origin and got a still of the swan, started working with the jacket template. - The bad thing. Mirror in the little office building, three walls, an old woman with no jaw any more, a fold from neck to chin. I had a beautiful jaw, and face padding, though I'm not fat now. Gullies under the eyes. Nice hair though, dark and silver. So what is this pudding face, not everyone my age looks like that. I went to Tom's after to bring him the jeep for tomorrow and found him soft and quiet in his pj's. He calmly listened to my speedy dump of computer events. 20
- 6.5 for every thousand meters 3 families of clouds cirrus - fiber, hair cumulous - heap stratus - sheet, layer nimbus - rainy Named 1892 Luke Howard "The view from high windows" 1783 "summer filled with inexplicable skies," reeking air, sickly sun, breathing problems, rotting meat. Aurora, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, electrical storms, stench of sulfur. The later Romantics is Shelley Goethe "the systematic succession of forms" Wholeness of nature Constable "I am the man of clouds" 1821-22. "We see nothing truly until we understand it." Two summers on Hampstead Heath learning to paint and the farthest stretch possible.
Cloud physics Convection cells "each one releasing buoyant energy" Cumulus congestus Air rising is surrounded by less pressure - expand, loose motion, energy=cooler. It rises if warm ie less dense. When cooler it can hold less moisture. Droplets grow around a seed - changes that attract water.
- Multicelled cumulus Cumulus congestus - multitude of cells in all stages of development, 25,000' and higher Strong positive buoyancy Air pulled to earth by gravity When water molecules in air slow down they're more likely to latch onto others - for instance a bit of dirt or other water molecules, ie condensing to water. When they rise they're less squashed together - spread out - lose energy by moving - get cooler. As it cools, bonds form between water molecules = water. Water droplets 10 microns = 10 twentyfive thousandths of an inch. Billions of droplets large enough to reflect light, a lot of empty space between them. Cloud condensation nuclei even smaller, one two hundred fifty thousandths. Slightly charged so they attract water molecules so the appearance of cloud granularity indicates that free water molecules have linked together into water. Growth as droplets collide in vertical motion, rapid where there's a lot of vertical motion. A small raindrop, a mizzle drop, is one twenty-fifth of an inch = a million droplets. Average would contain 10 milion. Large, cats and dogs, one hundred million. Cumulus = convection clouds. Cumulus: rising, cooling, humidifying, each cloud globule is the upward stem of a convection cell. Stratus - stable atmosphere - are stable - stratified Ground fog - air cooled by fog Sea smoke - rises from relatively warmer water Advection fog - warm moist air over cool water so air cools to its dew point Low stratus lifted by weak upward currents, warm front
Buttermilk sky - convection globules, air is oscillating up and down regions
[Tom talks to the book:
Manage / energy / indecision / speed
[Tom's signature, and mine] Billow clouds - parallel rows - wind speeds in layers above and below the clouds vary - shearing force. Sunset colors because of scattering by particles in the air, large particles scatter out blue. Hooked cirrus 'Natural law': natural orderedness Cars have driven further than the distance to the moon: 240,000 miles. One glance at the dark side of the new moon apprises us of the weather for thousands of miles westward where the whiteness of wide cloudy areas is earthshine's main source. Moon - one diameter Becoming capable of imagining natural order Someone in Murrysville Pennsylvania an hour on my site today, in Work & days, and three last week. Originally came in through Valleyview-Whitecourt last September. Transcribing on the new G3 for the first time, committing to it. It's silent. The keys are swifter. It's brighter, I think. Now it has exactly the desktop I had before. Now we'll see what happens if I restart in OS10. Also someone in Oregon State U bookmarked, someone in Montreal did a 5 min name search, was looking into film, graphics. Last night Tom and I happened into The march of the penguins. Tom was enchanted - Tom who despises nature documentaries. Said it stayed with him today. We were cuddled watching it in a warm bath of loving pleasure. The saintly way they hang their heads alongside, slow pondering necks with orange patches. The animal imperative to care for young, the solemnity of the partnership. Both the male and the female taking themselves to the edge of endurance for the sake of the egg and then the gormless hopeful chick. It's an image of faithfulness that comforted us. 22 Photoshop - I have a version - text, layers, frame grab. Two more days -
Murchie: how deeply the mystery of distance would affect me the shock of space awareness discus-shaped mass of 200 billion stars spinning in a turbulent whirl of gas and dust sun near the outer rim hub in Saggitarius - 80,000 light years when we look away from the rim, only 5,000 center a sphere of hydrogen one revolution every 230 million years empty space at least one atom of hydrogen every cubic centimeter Supergalaxy a wheel of wheels the evolution of galaxies and groups of galaxies from simple undefined clouds of random atoms toward structural symmetry and developed form Turbulence is the shearing effect of disparate velocities, the divergence of streams into eddies and subeddies. 25 Friday morning. Flying later. It's not 7 yet, mild clouds and a few crows. Something I had saved up to say from when I was walking toward Starbucks - that I haven't fallen for months. I should notice when it happens. I thought of that because I was feeling how I was walking. I'm limping more, my shadow says, but I feel light. When I'm on a corner waiting to cross I feel my hips fall lightly into alignment under me - a feeling I love. It's partly the jeans, the way when I'm in the right weight I feel them hanging from my hip bones. I've been happy this week, putting together the sky lecture and learning to make the DVD sleeve in Photoshop. Open time. Harmonious with Tom. I drove to his house at 4 yesterday, thinking to do my laundry before he gets home after 5, but when I arrived at the stop sign at Cypress there he was crossing in front of me, a tall thin-faced man in a beanie cap carrying a big backpack. We went for dinner to the Denny's on Pacific. Ate fast, he looked tired across from me. He was paying and I stepped outside. Held open the door for a homeless man carrying a bag with his take-out dinner. He looked at me as he passed through and said "You're a pretty woman. My Aunt Jenny told me, if you think a woman is pretty, you should always tell her." He had a good face, very weathered. His voice reminded me of Pilgrim. Slight smell of booze. A slight body in blackened clothes. Then he said something like "I used to be worse. I was a gunner in the airforce, got my hip shot at." The walkway was slick with rain. I watched him hobbling toward his shopping cart full of cans holding his thin hips twisted sideways. He stopped at the end of the wall, resting. As Tom and I came past he said "This weather is hard on me." He had the American buoyancy of spirit. Tom drove me home, stopped on the corner outside Davis. I gathered my bags, came around to kiss him through his window. Nice kisses, two identical with a gazing pause between, confiding and trusting. - Terminal 1 Lindberg Field. In transit. In the midst of conversations. Strange bodies. Plainfield 26th
The kind of day it was, in faculty meeting this morning Margo, large calm Margo in raspberry UGG boots sitting crossways in the armchair watching us hash out what to do. I don't think I can reconstruct it. People said what they say. Goldberg said we have to be very careful, Ralph said we have to be very careful, Lise said she wants to do something, I said we shouldn't roll over. There was a particular moment, I think. Ralph said we should be clear what we're fighting for not just take someone as an enemy. People said a just workplace. I said - what did I say - for people to be able to not feel defeated and silenced. From there we seemed rapidly to settle into a plan. It was a plan I found myself left out of. I want to say two things at once, here. One is that it's a good plan as far as it goes, it accommodates people's anxieties and at the same time takes on a larger cause. The other thing is that when it came to forming the committee for that action I volunteered and the waters closed over me. Then Goldberg went around in her expert facilitator way and asked everyone to say how they felt. Margo said how remarkable a group we were and had we noticed how that had just happened. People were saying yes it was wonderful and I was feeling, not wonderful enough, because Margo is still going. There she still was large and watchful at the head of the room, people comfortable around her in an even accepted light. I was seeing that that will be gone. 27 Last night at the supper table our fac was sitting at one of the big square tables. Goldberg said what could we talk about I said that one night with the Sufis there was an exercise where we went around and everyone told the happiest time they'd had. Goldberg immediately wanted to tell about a moment last week when she was doing yoga and felt her physical wholeness. Then we went around. KC said anytime she sees a cat or dog. Francis told a long story about his trip to India, being welcomed into a famous shrine. Ralph didn't want to tell anything but Francis began to tell one for him and then he picked it up and radiated with it - a chestnut tree that puts out suckers and they die back and it puts out more, the persistance of life. Lise said she has a happy gene and is happy most of the time. Bobby, who was sitting with us, was the revelation. There he was with his big eyes and bulging forehead. He told two stories about supporting someone who was being unjustly attacked. I could see that's who he is - a defender. Margo arrived and sat next to him. She didn't want to say anything. We went around again. I had told about work happiness, sitting in bed and breaking through and seeing the significance of the moment spread into the past and future. Bobby said he'd written a book about the history of deaf people and his uncle, at a meeting, had said he'd given them their history. Margo said two things. There was a moment when she was having to stand up at a community meeting and challenge the then president, and Bobby had just come and stood next to her. And also that any day, every day, if she gets into attention, something shifts, she sees differently. I'm having one of those moments where I'm thinking a lot of things. The complications of social life. I'm wondering why there hasn't been much of that sense, why I have been, whether I have been, shut down in them. What we'll lose with Margo. Depth. Margo's attention. Sometimes her support is transparently false, goofy, but everyone feels seen. What have I lost in myself in the last years. As if the attention Margo is talking about. I'm not talking to the book much. I don't have crisis. I haven't been pressing where I should - I've been coasting. The way in the fac - this is another thing I was thinking - real dislikes are suspended in social action. I mean the way people fall in with playing together. 28
29 This morning was dreaming I was driving into London seeing marvels. There were narrow streets covered high up with a ceiling of white gauze, white flowers. Driving a causeway over a broad brown river, I was seeing next to the railing piles of naked bodies coated with brown mud posed as living sculptures. Shon Workman - the woman in orange on the Chicago flight. 30 That's the second of the workshops - Body as spirit I after Theory yesterday. Lise afterwards standing with me and Margo under brilliant stars, a few, wanting to argue about reincarnation. I said "I don't want to argue with you Lise, I can't bear it, it grieves me so much when people say they're not going to die." I said it desperately. I had to search for the world grieves and it was right. Email from Mary saying Lil Epp has died. February 3
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