| in america 14 part 6 - 2008 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Plainfield VT 4th February Woke wondering whether it's not that there's something with me but that there's something wrong - I was seeing Goldberg gleaming as she has been this res - last night at Margo's goodbye quite radiant. I wondered whether Margo is being fired because of her management in conversations here and there. Yesterday at the cabaret so glum I was, old story of something happening the semester of Millie and Susan. Maybe bad conscience after that has jammed my take. A young man at lunch saying he believes in spirit worlds because he has spoken with spirits, seen visions. I said what I do, that I believe 5 ... the experience is valid as such but the explanation frame is something else. I said it's worth trying to see whether unusual experience can be understood as part of the physical. He said thoughtfully that he'd wanted to give up on the physical world because it had disappointed him. I said that's what I mean. He wrote Korzybski and Carol Gilligan on a napkin. It's 6:12 in my room in Studies, still dark. I'm the only one in the building. Drinking tea from my Starbucks mug. I didn't want to write anything yesterday. Do I know why. Just the feeling of not yet. Stephanie. At the cabaret she was the one thing that was perfect. I don't want to describe her and not have her again and again. In her coat standing tall in the cafeteria she looks a leggy serious big-eyed girl, slender, but when she's on stage she shows a thick white almost doughy belly. She was in simple costume this time, short black sweater and long black skirt rolled down. In the spotlight she was white belly, arms, and face, but all one form, rippling. She carries her face somehow perfectly, giving concentration and pleasure, looking at us quietly between her twisting arms and rolling torso. Seeing her I go altogether into adoration. Another good thing was Gary, who is a shapely lean man with the right ratio of shoulder to hip. I never see him without a head covering. Cabaret night he was wearing jeans, a red shirt and a pirate's silk scarf on his head, a lean long slightly whiskery blond face with pale eyes. When I sat down behind him he spread his arms to make himself large, kidding me. I put out my hand without knowing I was going to and gripped his shoulder. Felt the hard muscle under his red shirt. Took that away with me. Still have it in my right hand, a man. He was in Deena's group playing harmonica all out, gorgeously. When Stephanie was dancing he was yipping at the right moments and I was feeling, yes that's right, that's who to long for, a pain I was willing in. Ah I still so much want a man to long for me, what I'll never have again. Tom loves me and doesn't long for me sexually and never has and never will and that's a deprivation at the root. Something energetic I've been starved of, that when I've had it has made me marvelous, complete. And Tom is deprived of it too. He could feel it for a young woman. I have sometimes in this res gone to imagining Mac. I imagine what he's wearing. I see his bristling black hair and hawk nose and Indian eyes fierce with intention. He wants me like thunder, he gets so hard it hurts, and it's me it's for, exactly me. He has never cut his losses, he's integral, he has it all intact. He has used it to work, he has thought and made and carried everything through and now he can give me what he has always kept. He doesn't waste it in daylight, he doesn't touch me 'til I'm in his bed. And then it's necessary every time and right away. Saying so I come alive two inches into my pussy, just there, a strong burn. It's daylight now. almost eight. That's probably a snowplow. The pine branches I can see composed in little squares are motionlessly weighted with new snow, charcoal and white under a white sky, a few reddish brown trunks leaning across the forest edge. Right there, that band of space where I can see into the woods, dark trunks and complex depth with black and white lines crossing all back into it. Each small square a right picture. All through the week lonely for rightness. Bobby was right, Bobby's anger, Bobby was the only one holding his anger. Is there any rightness in my students? Gary. His dancing is right but there's something always posing in him. Deena. Onstage with her shovel nose and straight tall body, hoarse authoritative voice, she's alright, wonderful, but in her study plan she was wandering in mists. The usual, I thought, women forbidding themselves to know critically and aggressively. I tried a chair dialogue with her and that night she found a book connecting what she wants connected. Deidre. Her mother didn't know how to spell that name. A worried little face and smell of booze. Makeup and jewelry and a conspicuous hat. Would I tackle her about booze. I did. Will she stop drinking. It says yes. Kri again. She's a smart responsible hard-working admirable being and why do I continue to feel something is wrong. She tries too hard. She does everything in the spirit of wanting to be perfect. I hold off from that in her. Alex again. Alex is Alex, people say. A bustly little body shaped like a baby duck. Fine black hair flopping over her face. Bored in advising group. She has her art, she's found what she's doing, she wants to get on with it. Angela. That one's autonomous. Cool. She looks like a dyke but isn't. Very thick brown hair badly cut. A beautiful mouth and slightly buck teeth. Very cut off. The only person who has reported both sides the same in the two sides exercise. Says she's shy. A dumpy body. She's not shy. She's distanced. She'll work hard in Latin, Old English, French, Medieval literature and history. She'll never say you. Although when we were having our picture taken sitting on the floor in my office she liked it when I took hold of the back of her sweater and tugged her closer to me. Jaes. Last res, her first, she walked about in a broad-brimmed hat looking particular. She wears earrings and a necklace always. Pale dark-ringed eyes behind glasses, a thin small mouth ringed too with a bit of lipstick. Childhood mistreatment, institutionalized at 15 for being a lesbian. Mormons. Psychotic break? Probably. A drinker till 22. Some sort of breakthrough. Does recovery work with groups of women. 'Shamanism.' Said consciousness is unlimited. I had liked her intensity and rectitude and when she said that I sagged into disappointment. That again, the specialness of mysterium. And then she went to Margo scared she couldn't work with me. Sensitive. She'll feel what I'm thinking. After that, careful. She gave me a stone from Lake Titicaca, where it is said that female energies are being drawn into the world after a period in which male energies had been drawn in through the Himalayas. She's honorable. Margo said talk to Ellie. She said what she had to say and I said I'll undertake to stay in touch with the book in working with her and she got pinker and smiled again. David. Little big-eyed boy with fairy fingers. Sweet. A goodness, Margo said. He's in court-ordered treatment, urine tested once a week, so maybe he'll make it this time. Eager to write his identity essay. So eager he read the first couple of paragraphs in a light, nice voice at the student/faculty reading. The talk with Margo in her office. Margo does not love me any more. She would deny it. The gate is shut on my side too. I've seen through her? Sort of. Say more. Be fair. There went a crow across the white, eye level. There are decisions she should make rather than giving them to us. I honored her for supporting my boldness when it was correct. She backed me when I took risks, and I was working from that confidence with Millie. It got me into big trouble and got her into big trouble and yet neither of us were wrong. She does defend the real work, and yet when trouble came down she chose to lie low rather than stand up stronger, and that was the wrong decision. I lost respect there. I believe she could have prevented this firing. At her goodbye event I did something I think was wrong. (It says not.) Lise spoke, Bobby spoke, some others. There was a silence. I got up in my big black coat with my hands in its pockets and told the story of Margo seeing when I was crashing. "She came to dinner because she could see I needed her to be sitting there with me." And then after that Goldberg got up and after that KC closed the proceedings. Why does what I did feel worng. Because I'd thought there would be more people testifying. It seemed too small a moment to be one of so few stories. - Too small - yes, too young is what I mean. 9:11. I'll get up and clear the room. - Past the Rockies, ten to 5. When the sky cleared we were over Nebraska maybe, evening light on snow, blue shadows, pink light, both laid over crusted snow that lay differently on different kinds of field. Fields rectangular or round, in rows, in checkerboards. Bare dark fields that must be summerfallow. A sort of dark orange, not many of those, also bare. I had no idea what those were - corn? Another kind the pale pink of a snow glaze - stubble, I think. Scribbles, a few. There's no describing it but I stared as long as I could. Villages at crossroads, few buildings throwing hard-sided shadows, a long shadow that must be a church. What about it. So coherent a picture. There were streaks that were landforms but looked like drifts of snow. Nothing messy, nothing too much or too little. The fields looked a glaze of paint over a strong but quite simple much deeper surface of land. Arrangements of a few forms and a few colors in always more variations in the sweet even white pink. An East Indian family in the row ahead. The little girl who peeked between the seats - a small two? or less - was standing with her back to us and left her small brown hand where I could put my large fingers under hers. She had a small gold bangle on her wrist. She left her hand quietly on mine so that we were holding hands lightly in the sky. I was thinking how naturally she was allowing it. The big Swede next to me said "So natural." We're beginning our descent he says. Orange sun half a finger over the horizon. Is that the coast I think. San Diego 6 Tom leaning against the wall in his work jeans and boots and beanie cap. Walked me to the luggage carrousels with his arm around my shoulders. I'm telling that because it was a good arrival. We ate at Denny's and drove back to his place. Before we went to sleep he got in with me and pulled himself snug against me, wrapped his legs over mine. My head was on his shoulder. I fell asleep almost instantly - not deep but remarkably. What do I have left from the trip. The Swedish man next to me in the middle seat. He was not much older than me, born in 1943 in a village where his grandfather owned the general store, and his great grandfather before him. He wanted to be an engineer and went to Stockholm to go to college, the first in his family. Before he graduated he married a girl who was the first female in Sweden to work with computers. At first they were too poor to buy a vacuum cleaner, he said. He didn't last in engineering because he didn't like sitting at a desk all day making drawings. He went into insurance and worked up to general manager. Retired a couple of years ago. He and his wife moved to the Archipelago. Every winter during the darkest time their golfing club flies somewhere warm together. There were forty of them speaking Swedish at the gate in Chicago. They had left Stockholm early in their day. Somewhere over the midwest he held up his complicated watch to show it was midnight there. They'd had two children, a boy three years after they were married, a girl three years after that, the girl now divorced with three children. Talking to him I was trying to see through the sixty-four year old to the young man he had been, I was trying to see whether I'd have fancied him. He had blue eyes and a short-fingered hand with thick rings, spoke English perfectly. Looked healthy, cheerful. There was no question of fancying him as he was, I noticed. Was assuming it was the same from his side although I wondered whether I'd seem glamorous in another way. His wife, if that was her standing laughing with him next to the carrousel, was a good-humored-looking matron in matron clothes, short hair, glasses, whereas I had on my soldier cargos, docs, the poppy red zippered hoodie and a black muscle shirt cut in a V that shows half an inch of compressed cleavage. We were the same generation. He was a humane reasonable pleasant man who adores his children and grandchildren and had succeeded in what he did. He was interested in my work but would never have asked what I do. I noticed I was agreeing with him a lot. I told him hitch-hiking stories because he seemed to like them, I suppose because he'd gone to work so young. Before that - the res. There was the moment after the sky lecture when a tall woman with a flat face was standing in front of me saying "You're what I want to be when I grow up." She was asking where I went to college and I was saying faintly that it could have been any college. Then Emilee's note later describing the scene. 7 Always mixed feelings about Lise. I often find her ugly, her skeletal stork body usually in the same grey sweater and her long teeth that bulge forward. Her frizzy dyed hair. At the same time she's been my only ally and she knocks on my door and draws me out. I don't trust her but I talk. She asks and confides. She cultivates. Feeling-out is what she does, I know it's not personal, she doesn't really like me. At the same time I sometimes see the little girl she was, and I liked her eagerly telling me about the body work with Kast. Emilee. Her little pointed face like a fairy princess. Hugging her, feeling her round breasts hard as apples. Her quietness, the held-back conscious way she speaks. Her long dresses in strange prints. Princess Leia. Her back is quite curved and that curve has something to do with her hair in a bun and the hiddenness of her power. Two and a half weeks - I'm restless in my cell, want to go out somewhere and do something. Liked the way at the res meals were times to go into a crowd and find someone to talk to. Photos. Jaes sent one I like. Margo and KC smiling in sweaters with turtlenecks, EE not smiling. It's the best picture in years, why. I was standing on my toes (left foot) to look tall, kidding, but it did something for the look on my face. It's smooth and steady, even my hair looks good. I watched you today. First there were the little shivers of rightness and the tears that sprung to my eyes during your workshop today. Yesterday my eyes had rained condensed clouds as I tried to find ways to experience adoration of my grief and my joy, my early love that I didn't know how to see. Little diamond dust moments of that feeling during your workshop today, the way when you talk about the physics of clouds the heat rises in you like columns of warm air and lifts your hands up, makes your fingers condense into eddies of cumulus gesticulation. And then there was the describing of yourself afterwards. You are a body of gravity and I saw the other bodies, like mine, that have been drawn to you and that soft tea energy of yours, drawn in to an orbit of longing and aspiration having spent some time in the nearness of your glow. I watched you, to see how you navigate that careful description of self, that somewhat self-effacing but never apologetic recounting of how you came to your now. More in the hips and the floor now, more hands on the table, shining horizontal to show that gravity is also inertia depending on how you look at it. All this by way of saying thank you, thank you, a kneeling. A palm to the earth, fingers reaching to the sky, my gratitude to you for teaching me. For sharing with me. 8 So Elizabeth [verbal privilege] works for the Open Society Institute. Someone there googled me yesterday after I forwarded her the Robin Morgan piece on Hillary. That was at 10.11. 63.173.78. I forwarded at 6.26 Pacific. Soros' Foundation. Elizabeth Angell advocacy coordinatory communications. 11th Monday morning, Bassam's. Moving around the city, since I'm back, this morning on the bike coming from Tom's for instance, a sensation of newness, of being new in town. It's not strong. It's something to do with sun, air, maybe. The sun is intoxicating. A strength in the air I called it once, that wants me out, doing something in the town. 12 Transcribing the day book from when I drove north in June of 1978. More than once during the residency I was struck dumb by the beauty of you, so very much what you are. In the middle of my chest the gratitude wells ... There was that girl, gaunt and pale and soaked to the bone. She finally put it down and became a part of me ... Everyone here has seen it on me, seen the transformation ... "Even your posture has changed. You carry yourself differently. You have a confidence I've never seen before." Thank you, Ellie I know you expect to be unseen but I see you, and you are beautiful. [3 pages of notes on the Nikon 50] 13 I like the day records the way I now like any mention of the time up north. I like any mention of the country and I also like seeing myself recover. There are days of pain and then sometimes I'm in deep beauty again. I'm not girly the way I was two years earlier. I'm brief and bare. At my worst I still try too hard. 1978, I was 33. I'm looking for something to be, for how to be something exceptional. Here I'm pausing to think whether that was necessary. I made Trapline without so much trying, why couldn't I make the next film the same way. Because it wasn't just the film - I did make the photos that way - because I was testing my possibilities, I was walking out into wild land on my own, because I could. Wednesday morning. Do I have anything to say.
November 26 1963 "Mercury soars as cold breaks." Another of Dave's photocopies. -41 and five days later a chinook, 41 above. Photo of Judy standing holding the Governor General's with M, Ed on one side, Superintendent Toews on the other. Judy is tall and solemn, a long white face with strong eyes. Trying to decide what it is about them. Arrogant? Angry? M is showing two sides of her face very different, left eye larger, left side quite glamorous. She has her hand under Judy's as if she's claiming the medal too. Ed looks small-eyed and seedy, a cynical mouth. Bassam's. Three in the afternoon. I feel odd about these clippings. Dave makes so much of what I was when I was eighteen. He saw me someway then and has stayed imprinted. But I was just beginning, I don't want to be pegged there. - That's not really it. Is it something about death? She's gone and I will be. He's wanting to hold it for me? Something chivalrous? He loved my spirit, it seems. It's as if I was a vision of what he had in him to find later, his distinction. Also its lameness? Harmed distinction. What was he that year, what was he feeling. He was part of his town, he was it, wherever he went. He was the town drunk's kid, baseball player, basketball player, Sexsmith correspondent for the Herald-Tribune, beginning to be the rememberer without knowing he was going to be that. Meantime I'm in 1978, fifteen years later, driving the Lark on snowy roads. Reading old journals beside the barrel heater, in pain, more pain, in beauty, more beauty, in effort still, more lost, defeated, complicated, a part of no social group anywhere but taking the place as mine, and isn't that adoration what I miss? 15 Finished the day record volume yesterday and looking for a regular journal from January 1979. Can't find one so am transcribing letters to Jam. There's a welter of uncorrelated material - an ideas notebook, a reading notes book, loose bits, undated letters some of which I can place in relation to the day volume and some not. If I think of skipping any of it I think why not skip all of it, this junk is eating up my last years. Then I say but no, I'm committed. So I'm thinking skip the reading notes, skip the madness with Jam, skip the ideas notebook, take whatever daily record there is from the Jam letters, keep the ideas notebook with the grain book, collate as best I can and link the slides.
Louie suggested Tuesday morning to phone. It turned out she had something on her mind. She is hooked on her therapist, who was overjoyed to hear Doug had dumped her too. So now Louie needs to confess to (her mother) that she minds terribly not winning the competition after all. I listen to the point where I've said what I think she needs to hear, which is that certainly she has to confess, then say "Is it alright to talk about something else now," and tell about my students. Emails since then, two, Louie is back being grieved that I'm not giving her what she wants. These emails stab me and I'm terse and instructive in reply. I'm thinking now that Louie doesn't have a boyfriend any more she'll be mad at me in that deflected way again, blame me for it, have her feelings hurt if I don't comply.
I'm impatient with this stuck neuroticism, I feel that if I'm nice to her I forestall the crisis of misery that might make her do what she knows she needs to do and endlessly evades.
So now let me deal with that. She's stuck, whiny, evasive, blaming, babyish, cowardly. If that irritates me does it mean I am. No. I'm seldom that anymore. But something. I'm impatient. How many freaking years have we been dealing with this in you and you're still there. I'm contemptuous: I didn't hang onto you or anyone trying to be saved from myself, I did it. That's impatience. Impatience is anger at being dragged into something ugly and stupid.
18 Conference call. The way they laugh. Heh heh heh. Our possible PD. "My strengths I believe are paying attention to everybody ... help people feel that they're part of ... what folks feel their strengths are ... low-key way of coordinating ... make sure that people have a sense of agency ... being a program director is my next step at [the college]." Her voice is good - it's sexy - it has a little burr - it's a girl voice with a lot of ground in it. She's saying she's interested in concentrations. Ralph sounds hesitant and sweet and clear. Francis is taking initiative more, not badly but I wonder why now. Lise is articulate and friendly, very disarming. KC speaks up firmly. Jim is silent. Goldberg is organized and forward. People are more involved than I am - is the truth.
I should go through every check. 19 1980 January-March journal. At the beginning of this one I'm in Edmonton keeping house for the Irish grandfather and working in my room. I'm very deep in work. Is it the first time there's a mind that may be seeing better than mine [now]. There are notes that come to what I concluded in the doc process. There are passages where sorted collected notes show the form of the writing I came to - the first instances of it I think. What I've been feeling as I transcribe is the difficulty of the work I was doing, how much I had to consider, how much I had to take on, how much I had to be wrong and irrelevant in, to be able to come to what in the end was right and relevant. Huge stamina and valor in the welter. Transcribing, I'm feeling out how to present it. It's the pivot period of the journal. - Pivot period for work woman, I should say. Pivot period for love woman much later, in GW. Last night at the end of the conversation Ruth said "Ellie, I've heard everyone's voice but yours. I don't want to put you on the spot but do you have something you want to say?" I said "I'm listening very carefully and I'm okay with that." I'm proud of that, that was correct. But then after she'd gone, when people were saying "Well?" I did something not at all correct, that I'm ashamed of. I did it because I was feeling awkward about being so alienated from the group, so obviously alienated. Caryn had said "Well I'm ready to marry her!" Other people said this and that. Then I said "I'm pretty much ready to marry her too." Others then made very predictable jokes. - Why was that wrong. Because it betrayed Margo. Thoughtless. I've been one of the few who didn't, and there it was, to be part of the group I'm disgusted by. I can't undo it. Can I atone for it? It says yes.
20 Pushed through 1980 Jan-March and have March-December stacked to do next. This one wasn't unbearable, I could keep pressing. Am often going back to the notebook list and revising it. Uncertain dates, overlapped notebooks. A couple of big journals missing? Now I'm at the end of the day and can't transcribe more. Still in pyjamas. Will I go out to get tea, milk. Alright. 21 I hadn't realized that the mbo statcounter page had been unlinked all this month. Relinked it yesterday. Today I notice three visits coming in from a wiki page. Find an embodiment entry that links to [the college]. The three were from Bath, Ile-de-France and Bremen.
Canadian artist and philosopher Ellie Epp was born March 6 1945 in Sexsmith, Alberta, a small town 300 miles northwest of Edmonton. She is the eldest of four children born to Ewald and Mary Epp, Mennonite farmers near La Glace, Alberta. Peace River Country white settlement had been delayed, not opened to white settlement until 1912, so that grandparents on both sides, Mennonites who had emigrated from Mennonite settlements in Russia. Both parents immigrated with their parents as young children. Recent immigrants, small Mennonite Brethren community. On farm land that had only been cleared for about 30 years. Polio, away from home, thin leg and limp. Excelled in school, scholarship to Queen's University in Ontario - triple major in philosophy, psychology and English, courses in German, French, art history, music history. In her final year film professor Peter Harcourt, film studies. Filmmaker. London, University College Slade School film department post-graduate diploma. Son Luke Chisholm born. Experimental film. Silchester Road Public Baths, Arts Council of Great Britain, Experimental film conference at the National Film Theatre. Vancouver with four year old. Pender St where lived 23 years. Completed Trapline 1976. Art community, Dave Rimmer, Cheryl Sourkes, Daphne Marlatt, Canada Council grant to make a film in PRC. 1978-81 lived in farmhouses, a tape-slide show Notes in origin gradually completed, presented at -. Film sections not assembled until 1986, 8-year relation with Jamila Ismail, 1982-85. Despair, isolation, poverty. Treeplanting, roofing, painting. 1985 baby. Rowen. Community garden activist. Back to school neurophilosophy, Churchlands. MA first phase. Philosophy of math, representation. Second phase PhD working out antirepresentation view. Job at [the college] innovated a version of embodiment studies that worked from particular students. Lectures on. Joyce. Polio. Continuity of farm girl, experimental filmmaker working with perception and place, garden maker and activist working with place and body, epistemologist defending body, educator innovating a platform that includes neurophilosophy and personal integration. 22 Raining and the pepper tree thrashing. Transcribing spring of 1980, treeplanting and cooking. Business meeting amicable below. it's Friday, 10:15. There's 1600 in the bank. - Email from Nancy Shapiro inviting me formally to stay in her casita in Palm Springs. From there I'm jumping to the idea of making up lectures next summer on architecture and plants. Paradise lectures - architecture - the house as body - house in dreams - house values - The poetics of space - the house and the body - materials. Gardens - mandala. Plant bodies - the evolution of plants. House values and person values. -
26 I sent Louie an email saying journal emergency and she wrote back today saying she found 9 in the 6th store she tried. Finished transcribing all the letters to Jam. Now half a volume for the last autumn at the lake house and that will be all for up north apart from a lot of sorting and splicing. And then a whack of Vancouver volumes. 5 years. Someone in Las Vegas, either Jam or her girl, in Work & days. Scared me so I went to the beginning of Aphrodite 6, which is the only bit with her that's up. The front page after Row was born - imagining her reading it. It was alright. Honest extremity. Quite amazingly loose and real extremity. The letters got stronger. 27 The kind of night I have if I drink coffee in the afternoon, though I didn't. Lay awake. Rapid heartbeat happened four times. The most it has ever been was once, and that's been rare. Was it because I kicked myself with tea at three o'clock and drove unstoppably through letters until 8. Dreamed toward morning that a bull had followed me to M and E's house and got up on its hind legs to look at me through the bathroom window. I was trying to think what it could mean that he'd been able to find me - did I have some sort of psychic beacon he could read.
Quarterlife last night, first episode. Smart kids in their twenties living together trying to find their start. Writer girl with a voice-journal online. "I can see who anyone wants. I see everything but no one sees me." Yesterday morning a dream I felt sadly all day. I was at Maryanne's staying in a guest bed. She told me I had to leave because someone else was coming. Sadness of being expelled from family. All 8 packets are in. Huge labour I don't want. What do I know so far. Gary is an awkward writer, getting it done. Angela has a lovely academic tone, a perfect academic tone. Kri is worthy, worthy and bores me. Alex is delightfully herself and doesn't read much. Jaes oh Jaes is deadly pious and cramping. Deidre is surprisingly acute and willing. David is a good student, it turns out. Deena I can do something with, I think. [research into Jaes' system]
[diagram concentric circles labeled body, physical world; mind; soul-body; spirit=light] "The undying infinite self," "consciousness cannot die," "to recover one's innocence and trust in life." "I met a beautiful being of white light ... I brought this being back and blew it into my mother's heart chakra."
An incoherence that's distasteful in explanation. - My great grandfather Wilhelm John Martens homesteading 1927-1930 in Peoria. He was from Hurchair, Russia. The family was in Alberta earlier than 1927. A slew of jumps to the mbo page through a blog site called purse lip square jaw from Ottawa (more page hits than ever on any site, 24). Someone in Lisbon 24 minutes in and around index page mostly in writing and Being about - 21 minutes in that. 28 Circle Lo's page online. [circlelo.com] Transcribing fall of 1980, in the lake house alone, car finished, reading through Jam's box of books, most importantly Kenner on Pound. Beautiful notes I love transcribing, materials for Play of the weather. One of the things I want to talk about for this time is why and how I was holding so many questions suspended, what that was like, what it was good for, what's different about having decided so many of them, what kind of intelligence it was. How it gradually settled out from global bewilderment to the kind of alert subtlety there is in my last months in that house. Poise. My birthday next week. 29 1976-1980 a headlong effort. I admire it and thank myself. I took Jam with me, the evidence is, worked for her, and she did not thank me or know what she was given. I'm disgusted seeing her mean-heartedness with me, her mad cranky presumption and carelessness. A poem from Stacey last night called To the chamisa. Stacey works hard. She's ardent and hungry. Since she wrote her own story she is wider and more surrounded. There is a world. She thanks me. And Emilee sent me her packet though Francis is her advisor. She wrote it as if for me, she didn't hold back to accommodate him. She wrote very lightly about Tantric Buddhism, she wrote like a realized mistress not a drained scholar, and she wrote about deciding to leave her dissociated wife. She wrote herself out of dissociation and can leave the deflected task. I help. She thanks and I thank her back. She says everyone can see that she is holding herself differently. Anna wrote from her first PhD semester at CIIS. She knows she's well prepared. A course on the phenomenology of embodiment. And is there any caliber this semester. Gary is a chaotic mess except when he writes his own story. Deena wrote a good piece about rap lyrics and busting up her servitude to her mother. Deidre is surprisingly alright in tone though she has fallen for enslavements to men and booze. My brain goes dumb when I write to Jaes. I don't hope for anything for her. David is a little boy, someone who doesn't mature though he is competent and graceful in writing. He was a light-hearted child and wants to remake the world so it will suit that child continuingly: anarchism and animal rights. Alex is on her own ground but she is lightweight, she's going to stay where it's cuddly. Angela is the other way, so autonomous she's going to ignore me though I like her topic and her incision. Kri. - No there's no one I can run with. What is each of them meant to be. Kri will be a good teacher, community college level. Deena will go on being a musician but what's the best that could come of her work with us - that she can stand in her own story in confidence, write songs out of it. Deidre wants a PhD, why, she's cashiering in a department store and wants money and status but does she want the work? She makes pretty books, Nick Bantock books. What should she have a PhD in.
Campbell Ross in Grande Prairie writing to invite me to speak next September. Can I arrange to be there quite a while maybe - res ends Aug 16, appointment in Van Sept 18. March 3 Black Canyon Road yesterday. Trying the camera for the first time. I drove, so I could stop when I wanted. Some places a thin glaze of green that is ugly with the rusted color of the bare ground. Through the lens I could sometimes see whited areas as if calcined or ashed, a nice effect. Wild paeonies in a few places on the bank. A few little shrubs of white sage. Weedy little things. Lupin rosettes. The best moment of the day was coming around a corner on the Ramona road and seeing a mountain with orange patches fitted to its bare contours. California poppies. Mustard in the lower fields and on the verges. Tom was lovely company all day. In Santa Ysabel he said when he's there he never wants to come home. I like one of the photos I brought home but the focus isn't good enough. It's where I found a patch that was all bare - it's only folds and colors, a mineral place. It's beautiful and catastrophic, apocalyptic. Reread Emilee's beautiful packet. Her intro taking refuge and then her so-deft so light and precise summary of tantra, and then her letter describing her decision finally to step out from under the lonely weight of her wife. (What will Francis do with it.) Reading it feeling that I have a sangha too, my sangha is smart committed people like Emilee. They are my sangha because I can trust them. My skill with students like her is mainly to give her to see that I recognize her intelligence. I'm so disliking Margo's fret about Angela because I see what she is and want her to know that. A disobedient body.
- Alex the African grey parrot [cover image] died at 31, 2007. Irene Pepperberg. 4 Tuesday morning. Sitting in bed with the hot water bottle under my right knee. Sun at the window, which is dewy because it was clear and cold last night. Nearly 8. I have to talk to Gary later, then go to Tom's house to look at Alex's movies again. And then I'll be done for this cycle. Trouble last night with arms going to sleep. I have to stretch my shoulders before I go to bed. There's also that stinging of hands and face, whatever it is. Try vitamin B. What will I do with my week and a half - Mesa Grande on my own and overnight. Begin process of getting slides scanned. Finish transcribing the north journals. Need to work faster to get things done. Search terms to promote. [couple of pages of notes on making DVDs] [pages of statcounter summaries for mbo international, mbo US and Canada, Work & days, index page, Being about] [summary of jeep costs] [couple of pages about film transfer]
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