| in america 15 part 1 - 2008 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
March 6 2008 How should I start this book. A Thursday morning. Bright day through dewy windows. Space Hotel. I'm 63. Not a number I like. I like the roundness of 6 but not with 3. It's an insignificant number, mediocre. I wrote the last packet letter yesterday - am off 'til the 17th.
- Bassam's, later. There I am with sun in my eyes, grey bangs, shiny brown at the bottom of the queue. How do I look. Thick-necked. Thinner mouthed. Definitely my age. Healthy, keen. Omar is a cellist. He looks nice. He's tall and has dark brown eyes, thick grey hair. He works in a jacket and tie. Soupy piano and strings today, The rose, The way we were. Alex's movies online - the technology is unusably crude. I have an Orpheus file open and don't know anything except that bits of it are good, very good. I think now I need to concentrate on form.
7 Phoned Mary last night, thought she would have been trying. It's remarkable how she fades away from what I need, swerves. I said I'd been invited to be a guest speaker at GP College. She didn't say What are you going to talk about?, she swerved into talking about Dave Leonard. I said that I thought it was extraordinary the way I could be sent away from everything I knew at less than three and still be as strong as I am. She didn't say You are an amazing spirit, you were an amazing child, she ducked sideways into talking about Ed's strength. I said I had been so independent a student, nobody ever needed to tell me to do homework, I did everything by myself, grade nine, grade twelve, I chose my college, I did what I needed to get there. She didn't say Yes you were a fierce committed spirit and it must have been lonely, doing it all alone. She said, immediately, Judy was like that too, and in Paul it didn't show right away, but poor Rudy ..., and then wanted to go on about him. Clueless. She told me the story again, she always forgets she has told me, of dying when she felt her husband would never love her and appreciate her, and never having cried since. I agreed that she doesn't feel. She said her children all leave her, and I said yes because she doesn't feel them. I said that in the period when I was living up north I saw a lot of them and I tried so hard to get through to both of them, I was confused and desperate and they both stonewalled me. She said she couldn't see it. So even now she doesn't feel me, she doesn't feel what anything I tell her is for me, she doesn't take anything in. She's blank, she slips sideways into some shelter. I say what I have to say, though, I see how she is. It's Friday, I have ten days off. Finished 1980 to the point where I go back to Van. Emilee in the hardship of having made off with her sister-in-law's husband. I do I do see spirits and feel them, I am not blank though I am mean.
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in Hilly country, free men We don't hear about priests School comes from the Greek word for leisure Beauty and comprehension together Aristotle "If we so desire we may gain full and certain knowledge of each and all ... If in the spirit of love of knowledge we search for causes ... then will nature's purpose and her deep-seated laws be revealed in all things, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the beautiful." Paganism survived in Provence ... lost the names of the gods and remembered the names of lovers ... Ovid Ecologues ... aristocracy of emotion ... I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy
Greek writing is plain, matter-of-fact bare A direct translation produced an effect of baldness quite unlike the original. a subtle language, full of delicate modifying words, capable of the finest distinctions of meaning clarity and simplicity of statement, the watchwords of the thinker
The standards of aristocracy, not to lie, to keep one's word, never to take advantage, to be perfectly courageous and courteous, to be liberal and magnificent. The possibility and prerogative of the well-born. Reading Pound as waz last night impressed that Pound took on making a culture to suit him - he marshaled - he corresponded with hundreds - he got people published - suggested reading - he devised curricula and assembled readers - said it takes 600 to make a culture and acted on that - did that all his adult life - married into literature - and did it also for the literature of the ages, networked with the past - studied their craft to sustain the best of it. And Brakhage did something like that too, so that he is still revered in the Frameworks list. I've had former students asking me to do that, conduct a school, but I ignore them unless they are exceptional. The other reason is that the ground isn't my best one, I want to develop women and embodiment studies where I can do that, but my best ground is where men have always been my best supporters. I have never looked square at this, how divisive it has been of my power. The puzzle I have about Pound is his letters. The writer loves what he calls their humor. They are hideously sophomoric. He was entertaining his inferiors. His letters are like mine to Frank or Reiner, full of false play, grotesque. Is that the only way to sustain a network? And what did any of this have to do with his dejection in old age. Poetry kept within the sober limits of the possible We cannot anymore be honest like that. It shocks us. "What I aspire to be and am not, comforts me" is Pindar. "She who has made so many good speakers." "I suppose you mean Aspasia." Symposium Diffidence - Socrates had sophisticated diffidence, she says. So what sort is my undiffidence - I don't want to be diffident because I want to be free to work something out in the presence of whomever - I haven't already worked it out. It's true that is unsophisticated but I'm not well-born, I'm still catching up. Physical involvement and vitality - artists were also warriors and politicians. She wrote her first book at 60 and this edition at 72. Headmistress of a girls' school for 25 years. b. 1870. Her style is often greasy but she makes basic sense. Why am I reading her. Because I want to keep company with the pagans. Greeks, Hellenes, Renaissance Italians, troubadours, 16th c. England, Yeats, Pound in that mood, isn't Woolf a pagan? Yes.
so loveable, a high and careless spirit, slow to mark a slight A Greek temple makes the spectator aware of the wideness and wonder of sea and sky and mountain range as he could not be if that shining marvel of white stone were not there. In the same way a Greek tragedy brings before us the strangeness that surrounds us through the suffering of a great soul. The individualizing tendency, the preoccupation with the deep and lonely life of each human being, marks the English. - And now I have to deal with Lexi who is furious that I didn't comment on her films and did comment on her language. What do I think of Lexi - she's trivial, she wants blood and guts and she's not subtle and doesn't want to be subtle, and is not clear and doesn't want to be clear. I'm right about the language and she furiously denied it.
9 Hamilton - religion in Greece developed by artists and philosophers - rather than authority, an ideal, excellence. Compared to magical cultures where there's no dependable relation between cause and effect Delphi the shrine of Apollo, the artist god Dionysus orphic Eleusinian Demeter Mysteries that promise immortality "A light moves to meet you, pure meadows that receive you, songs and dances and holy apparitions" Plutarch 1st AD Initiation and religion Socrates believed that goodness and truth were universally desired
- Tom brought home a picture from Baras thrift shop not long after I'd got back from the farmers' market. I was watering the plants on the rail. He was saying Don't come in here until I get it up. It's a narrow horizontal painting (matted print) of a Mediterranean house with cypress and other trees painted to be indistinct as in dusk. It replaces his happy green bird. He kept coming to stand in the doorway to look at it. It's the style of his building. Tarnished gilt frame that looks good with the marble table. I cooked breakfast at 4 and we watched one of the movies he brought. It was a German film about a Bavarian retired salt miner who goes to Louisiana to find Zydeco music. The thing about it was the way it was shot. Still camera framed the way I do it, things on the edge of the wide rectangle. He had a shot of the sky with an airplane like a needle pulling a thread. Very German rooms with people in them not saying much. Seeing it with Tom was perfect. We both were interested every moment. A fat impassive bachelor playing the accordion. The film loved him and anyone. Tom and I were cuddled up together holding hands. I am grateful he is so willing anytime to want me near him. Ilu I said. Il me 2 - ... u, he said. 10 When I showed up Saturday aft he had a look on his face I didn't like and I went into the state where I'm saying inwardly, I have to leave him, etc. He picked it up. You're on tilt aren't you. I said I'd had a rumble with a student and told it, and unpacked my computer to show him the exchange. Meantime he opened his and read me what he has of his North Park piece. I wasn't done but I knew I could get him back later, and I did. When he'd read through the three letters and said a little about them I was all better. It has often happened that I don't know I'm freaked until I see him, and then don't know it's that until I've shifted. I always believe I have to leave him. His North Park piece is the way his writing is - very encrusted - encrusted with jewels is the image that comes when I'm listening - fancy - references to Hockney, other painters, music - words like intaglio - listening I marvel at how different his brain is - fertile I said - he heaps associations - I'm scandalized by that but at the same time I was wondering whether I'm outclassed by his profusion. There are a lot of people who admire that style. It's Catholic, saints and relics and vestments and altar paraphernalia. When he'd read and I was commenting he flushed red and smiled his lovely rare shy young smile and I felt shone upon as if a god had very briefly appeared, his realness. The coming-true of him and of our story. I told him about Mary's blankness. He listened perfectly, consoled me with sympathy. What is it with Lexi. I'm at fault in a way. She was the last of the 8 and I was fed up with enslavement. I couldn't play her films easily, I was bored with her process paper, same old wallowing in a vision of herself as unacceptable although now she's making a career of it. Pretty language that doesn't get through it. I didn't know what to say to her. Was bothered noticing she's still talking about mind vs body, culture not accepting. Would I write her off and just be pleasant or would I tackle the core. I tackled it. She freaked. I touched the nerve. She doesn't dare shift. She's misreading me to be able to hold onto her hide-out. At the same time it's true that I neglected her but she's furious and insulting more than I deserve. She's blaming instead of focusing, she's panicked. She wants maternal support and I'm not giving it. I want her to take on the simple task of writing a process paper without needing me to tell her what to do and then being mad at me because she's thinking of me as her boss. 153/89 84 beats per minute because of Lexi complaining to Margo. What can I do with that. Monday three o'clock, seems earlier because it's the day after time changed. I drank tea this morning because I couldn't find my roibos chai and then was wound up enough to have dealt with three pages in my answer file. I haven't mentioned that these nights there's a scent in the air, the California spring scent, pervasive. It's the bushes in front of the cathedral I think. The small acacia on Tom's landing bloomed yellow. The honeysuckle on the fence grew foot-long fronds in a week after the rain. [notes on US social security and Canada Pension] 11 It's the laurel tree across from the cathedral - I brought some home. Happy this morning. I bought a tent. Worked at Dawne. Bought an axe and a cooler. 12 Lake Henshaw. Daytime TV, hideous, in the café. Clouded over. Weak sun. Not a lovely season. Thin green and dun. - Early afternoon. I set up the tent, made my bed, figured out the new Coleman, put on water for tea, got out the dish box for the first time, emptied it, washed what's dirty, spread it on the picnic table to dry, decided which are dishtowels and which is my hand towel. So far just the pleasure of being here on a ridge over the lake with oaks rattling, puttering with camping things. That I have camping things again, a year later. There's my jeep looking a wonderful deep teal color. During the night I woke from a little dream vision of a kind of jeep I hadn't known about. It started me thinking what kind of people jeeps are. The Wrangler is a teenage boy. The Cherokee is a young man. The Grand Cherokee is a heavyset family man. The Commander is a bullish old officer of 50. Then I was startled to notice that the Liberty is a young woman. So here I am sitting under an oak with my young man body alert on its big tires across the road. Growls from the highway. Crows. The mountains nearer the coast were spectacular with flowers, orange and purple. Harvest song, wedding song, a paean to Apollo, a threnos or mourning song. 13 Anza-Borrego, Glorietta Canyon. Shade behind a boulder. Here's my new white hat with zipped pocket for credit cards I suppose. A Colorado desert flower book, an Anza-Borrego book. What's it like here. Pale mountain humps with darker red-brown rocks embedded. Silvery blue-green brittlebush clumps, gangly yellow-green creosote bushes. The rocks are large-grained like coarse ground hamburger. That's the slope opposite me. Sky with very soft thin cloud sweeping northeast. The light stings my eyes but in sunglasses I'm cut off. The famous flowers are not much, they're not sheets - phacelia, chuparosa, desert poppy, little gold poppy, desert chicory (it's white), checker fiddleneck. - Then I take the road out and see the desert floor yellow with desert dandelion, and a few early flowers on barrel cactus, cholla and beavertail. On the beavertail a clear glossy pink with a frilly gold centre, like a superior rose. Yellow on the barrel cactus - same shape - and the best is the cholla, pale green. Had a shower, sort of a shower, in Christmas Circle. Why did I think there was a shower there. What it turned out to be was a tiled alcove with two low taps pointed upward. Soap on my feet, clean socks. Iced café latté and then I have to choose my phone - the one next to the liquor store. Here I go. 14 Hat and no shirt. Tea. It was a windy night. Mad gusts. In the quiet I'd drift asleep and then a sudden flapping of the tent would wake me. Have folded the mattress into an armchair against a back tire. Not very here. At night grinding on the faculty call and Nora's email yesterday, what seemed to be its irritated tone. Looking vaguely at the stars and thinking I still know hardly any of them. There's Orion, there's the Big Dipper, that must be Sirius. Polaris. The Greeks knew them just like this. I'm going to stay here all day. Maybe it will be long enough. Friday - should I stay tomorrow too. An hour before the sun came up I dragged my bed out onto the gritty yard. A row of creosote bushes danced hard before the pink sky. On the slopes here it's the brittlebush halos catching the light. An ocotillo higher on the slope than the others holding up its many arms where it catches the wind I can hear. - These are Michael Schmidt The first poets. There were once springs and trees here in what is no longer Thrace but a land divided between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. the most often sung and told of the stories a voice which would bring us a visionary calm the vision would be of the real forms that underlie the phenomenal world a serious and perilous undertaking, of a kind that only love motivates Eurydice wide justice, Graves says wide-ruling Aristeus tried to rape her
Virgil Georgics trans Robert Wells Poems attributed to Orpheus were common in Greece in the 6th-5th centuries BC. Plato quotes and alludes. Orphism - human soul as immortal and divine, immortality achieved by acts of discipline, ritual and moral purity - action, diet. There were statues and images of Orpheus all over Greece, said Pausanias. Travel writer 2nd AD. A xoanon made of cypress wood placed in an inaccessible spot Hymns in hexameter Greek hymnos relates to the word for woven or spun weaving a hymn
15 Verbal privilege this morning links to and agrees with a British journalist talking about older feminists' insulting descriptions of female Obama supporters. I'm sore-hearted, reading it. The young women are betraying us, is how it feels. We want an explanation. They're doing it because they can. They take for granted the freedoms and advantages we put ourselves on the line for, and they now are identifying more with youth and privilege. I think there's something else too. I think they're eager to depose their mothers and they are willing to give up the chance of a woman president to do it. When I was young - and now - I hated my mother's oldness and compromisedness - I hated the fate I didn't want. I wanted and want to stamp on her grave. This is their chance to do that. They're willing to identify with a young man to do it. The faultlines in feminism haven't been well understood. 1. Sexual competition among peers, 2. matricide, 3. dissociation of love woman and defenses against her. I don't like Obama. I can't stand his male strutting and his ranting tone. He's demagogic, he makes empty speeches that rouse the crowds. If Hillary did that she would be called hysterical. When she tries she sounds worse - and he sounds as bad but people don't hear it. She is described as compromised, and she is, and so would he be if he hadn't evaded hard decisions. She has been in hard scrutiny for many years and he hasn't, he looks clean because he's been out of sight. A woman president would make a difference to women's standing all over the world. When will there be another chance - no woman could come up the way Obama did. - The trip. At the Lake Henshaw site the Mexican worker with a good face who came up the hill on his little tractor to check on me and stayed to help me light my candle lantern with his lighter. You have matches from Mexico, he said. Warm. He was one of those warm bright-eyed Mexican men who see. I'm proud of you, he said. That was because I'd put the tent up by myself. I'm proud of me too I said. It's a big tent. Yesterday morning walking with the camera got me there. The photo of the beavertail buds is the one I like. Just began to see. Then the wind drove me out. Put on Buddha Bar and drove back. The San Felipe valley with bright new leaves on the willows. A few south-facing slopes with California poppies and lupins. Thursday night took the conference call sitting on the pavement under the payphone outside the liquor store for an hour and a half. She brings this language, in the strict prosodies she invented, and with a subtle sense of phrasing and the sounds words make, a quite perfect pitch when it comes to the modulation of vowels and the patterning of appropriate consonants, as close as a language can come to the experiences of which she writes. ... inner assonances and alliteration.
Are the colors correct - ruby base of spine, orange of rising sun abdomen, yellow solar, heart green like new grass, throat blue of summer sky, darkening to third eye indigo, funnel of violet at top of head, white light of unconditional love pours down and fills. Imagine wrapping it up and sealing like a cocoon.
Is there a way to understand the 'spiritual' axis?
Ground floor family, middle floor social, top floor work.
19 Dreamed Tom shooting up into his thigh. I was in Vancouver trying to think where I could move. It goes on a question. My evidence is, he's not raging, he's saving money. On the other side, he's giving me money, for instance buying my gas, as if paying me off, and the other kind of evidence which is that I have no interesting connection with myself, as if I'm living deceived. It said yes to that. I'm aching all over these days, what is that.
An epic history of the world as known to the Greeks that ends with the death of Odysseus, the last of the heroes. The gods exist in the poems merely as emanations from or clarifications of human impulses and conflicts, similies. Aerial views given. In epic characters are differentiated by their diction, the length of their syntactical periods, their tones in relation to their peers and their inferiors. It is a wonderful moment of human laughter. tiny gusts of exquisite scent; they come from the wild, almost leafless cyclamen. Valley of the Muses, contests of the Mouseia Sacred groves, deep shadows and cool springs. Temples and a famous sanctuary, decorated with statues representing the muses and their servants the epic and lyric poets. Hesiod. "He is keen to make understanding out of what he knows. At heart he is a philosopher, the first of the Greek philosophers in fact, looking for stable forms, but without - because he comes so early in the history of his culture - the prose instruments of later thinkers." Account of man and his relations with the physical world. In Schmidt a sense of people in their time imagining their place, its geography, through their epics which describe real loci in doubtful or fabulous incidents. It hypes the places with heroic and marvelous feeling. - That isn't what I began to say but I like to know it. Creating place-love, creating in place love. The place imagined is also a memory palace, gods and stories attached everywhere. Place and story. 20 Yesterday morning walking back to the jeep from breakfast on the pier - walking on the road, the Ocean Beach parrots spitting palm seeds from their holes high under the fronds - I was telling Tom the Easter Rudy was being born and we stayed at Friesens' house with the creek next to it in spring rush - looking at Madeleine's boobs and realizing for the first time that I would get boobs too - wandering into Corny's room and staring at a pin-up on his wall, the first time I'd seen the bursting divinity - (Easter eggs with runny centres - sitting in an upstairs room reading religious romances I'd found in the under-eaves closet) - and then telling our yard in spring melt, the crease between field and pasture that turned into a creek in the first week in April, the stream down the centre of the lane, we in our rubber boots chasing the bits of wood we had floated for boats - and the melt water under the house filling the cellar so we could hear glass sealers clinking together (sealers that native word I don't think I've seen written) - anyway the point is that I was walking on the street with Tom (he said Why don't we move over to the sidewalk, I said No I like walking in the street, he said In that case I should let you walk on the outside) telling him a childhood story feeling free and comfortable with him and noticing that we had got there though it has taken so many years. Then after some indirections we were in the OB library watching Obama's race speech on Youtube on his G3 with our heads close together because we had the sound low. Toward the end of the speech a big drop of water splashed down next to the keyboard. Tom was crying. I was dry-eyed noticing that Obama had found psychologically the right note and was supporting it visually, the note being that he is between black and white, sympathetic to both, a bridge. He supported it visually by symmetry, a flag on each side, the flagpoles posed symmetrically, two microphones pointed toward him, one from the right and one from the left. Gestures sometimes with the left hand, sometimes with the right, his head turning to one side and the other, evenly. He was positioning himself as the corpus callosum, which is correct. This speech he didn't rant, he spoke very evenly, reasonably. He wasn't rabble-rousing, he was declaring an intelligent position. Watching him I was thinking whether Hillary could do something like that, come out with a personally centred statement. Is she too compromised to come through into it. What would she have to say, she can't say she's halfway between men and women, though she is, culturally. He isn't saying he's neither black nor white, he is saying or implying that he's fully black and fully white. Is she fully female and fully male? Could she be understood if she positioned herself that way? It's held against her that she was a wife - that's hard to talk about. She can't say so because wives don't want to be conscious of oppression and blacks have had to be, the oppression of wives as such is so personal, so one-to-one, and so much depends on not bringing it forward. Women who have had to notice it are her supporters but young women are thinking it won't happen to them. Will it? Yes. It happens to mothers because mothers are slaves, not historically but generically. Mothers have to be slaves unless they can get someone to be the necessary slave for them. Being a mother is humanly shameful at the same time as it is naturally divine. Hillary hasn't thought through her position, hasn't thought through the politics of her position, in the way Obama has. She has accepted the terms of politics as they are, and that has to do with being a wife. She has lived in Bill's world. There is no way she could be running for pres if she hadn't, and yet it undercuts her. Is anyone writing about her bind in a sympathetic way, forming the centred position for her? She would only be a good president if she could draw from her centre, stand centred in her widest political position, which isn't Bill's. Authenticity is noticed. Both her competence and her wobble are noticed on both sides. I think she likes Obama. I think she's sad that she couldn't be that. She got to be first lady, she got the adventure of that, which she would not have had if she'd hewed to her core. Is there another woman somewhere who could hew to her core and become president? If it is naturally divine and humanly shameful to be a mother a centred woman would have to stand visibly balanced between divinity, by which I mean nature, and social power. Love woman and work woman. How would that look. Her pantsuits are not a good idea. She comes across as denying body. She should be signaling goddess glamour with her body and outright astute clarity with her speech. Pelosi is closer to that. So is Dolly Parton, come to think of it. Two people have talked about how I was, talking about clouds in the sky workshop. Deena put it into her definition of divine: "Numinous, synchronistic, unexplainable, heart open and filled with love, above, becoming something more than I am, when Ellie Epp talked about clouds the inspiration, the energy that surrounded her words, the animation behind her intelligence." Emilee said "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." The woman who came up afterwards and said "You're what I want to be when I grow up." 21 Talking about the formation of cumulus I became - they saw me as - my form blended with - the air structure I was calling up in them. They saw something I wasn't seeing myself though I was being it. It was the rising of love into intelligence: the rising column of the spine, the definite terminal florets of the cortical surface. Students like Lexi - and this is Lise's understanding of embodiment studies too - hold onto the mind-body contrast and try to opt for body as opposed to mind. I keep having to say it again, what you're thinking of as 'mind' needs as much recuperation as what you're thinking of as 'body.' Step out of the contrast. It's a stupid contrast. It's how dissociated people speak, it's symptomatic, and it perpetuates the physical split. I should do a workshop on the split itself. It would be a way to ground talk of how "we make our reality" by our thoughts. People accept the mind-body contrast because there is a true contrast they aren't naming accurately. They use the contrast to name a conflict. More than one conflict but always a conflict within their embodied nature. The workshop could be an opening into the radical practice of philosophy to examine the roots of how we think - how thinking works - how core misunderstandings are built, why they are retained, why they are plausible, persuasive. There are true conflicts, true inner divisions, but using the mind-body contrast to name them perpetuates them, reinforces them, makes us misunderstand ourselves.
Why have I so easily slipped it. I have always used my schooled intelligence in a way that consults unschooled intelligence. There was a lot of being in the way I grew up that wasn't language. How this fits with the workshop on the unconscious. The question of what we mean by 'I' - what does 'I' speak for. Faery tradition: talking self, younger self, larger self. Invoking the sky invoked intelligence. Is there some way I can use an element invocation for this one too. Body as earth? When I say body I mean the whole, what fades into air. People by body mean visible body, body as imagined in biology. Invoke a vision of body transparent Give a meaning of mind within that vision Body as ether Order - imagine subtle colored flows Imagine embeddedness in world, continuity with world
1. mind-body contrast 2. the unconscious 3. 'consciousness,' ego, 'I' - what is consciousness
An arrowhead found one metre down on the northwest edge of the Anza-Borrego, between 8,000 and 12,000 years old, obsidian from Mammoth Lakes near Yosemite, has traces of cervidae (deer) blood proteins. Transcribing the middle of the 1981, the June planting at Slave Lake - it looks like an apex - I was 36 - physical ordeal, over the top sustained physical work makes me the best looking I ever can be - I was vibrating high - in the long daylight reading Robert's manuscript. I mean too that it was an apex for the others, all beautiful in their physical moment, Le corridor our marvelous song, the pillared light. A life. The discipline of moving as nothing but a moment, but the other discipline of the finished whole. Do I just imagine that? Brian, Robert, Brigitte, Jean and Bunny, Jabez, Suzanne, Sue 24th At Tom's house this morning the sun rose due east straight in through the kitchen doors. Woke from such a good night. Lifted my head and there was the long horizon heating orange and clear. Jaes. I wrote loving interest in her personal story and am ignoring the religion. She is grateful. Deena wrote that her feelings are frozen and defined divinity in a way that looks like feeling longed for. Kri wrote in distress about still wanting to talk about wanting to bring body and soul together. She noticed fear of death comes up. 25 Kri wrote "I imagine I may be hazarding some blasphemy" in suggesting she was wanting to think understanding life as a physical structure might be "limited in some ways." I wrote: I wouldn't like to be so dogmatic that anyone would associate me with blasphemy. At the same time I am often sad to be so alone, even at [my college], in biting the bullet about death and the supernatural. Yes there is a lot we don't know, but why is it that humans expect that unknown to guarantee their fondest weakest wishes in exchange for refusing to know the marvelous things we CAN know? It grieves me that this is so universally so. I don't mean you - I am just telling you why I may come across as hard-line. I wrote that paragraph in a gush of realness and am satisfied with it but when I read it over I don't see the heart-gasp it was. Reread The other wind these last days. It's about the same thing, the destruction of life by a bad bargain made in hope of immortality. She's [Le Guin is] steadfast. She has given herself so many places. I am saying that thinking how I remember Mac's imagined house, and Mac, as well as I remember real places. She can remember any of her stories that way. I had forgotten the plot, which is important, because the last chapter, Rejoining, has humans and dragons unbuilding the wall that keeps the dead sealed in a land that has died of being sealed. When the wall comes down the dead are allowed to evaporate and the walled land revives, is given back to the dragons. So what are the dragons. Surely they are fantasy, what she does. She says of them that they and humans were one kind and a choice made them two. Humans chose making and keeping, dragons chose flight and animal authenticity. They speak the language of the making - what does that mean. - No the wizards are fantasy. The dragons are wildness, animal nature. Its territory has been sealed in us because we know animals die. Wizard fantasy stays in contact with wildness because wildness in us is the power of making. She does. Giving wildness its territory back rebalances the world. Yes. But what does it mean. It means the quietness they notice in me because I do that.
Her lands without motor noise. Ships sail, people walk, ride horses, catch currents in a dirigible for long journeys. Eat fruit and cheese and drink wine moderately but often. Noble kings and queens. A lion-eyed princess. She paused, hesitated, thought, and replied, "Your, ah - small kings? - sons! Sons, your sons, let them to be dragons and kings of dragons. Hah?" She smiled radiantly, let the veil fall over her face, backed away four steps, turned and departed, lithe and sure-footed down the length of the ship. "Oh!" Seserakh whispered, dropping to her knees. She had seen Lebannon lying near the doorway, stretched face-down on the grass. "He isn't dead - I think - Oh, my dear Lord King, don't go, don't die!" Why, besides "lithe and sure-footed," does the princess make me cry. Her language is beautiful to me. It's love woman isn't it. The red-veiled beauty inexperienced and frightened, given away by her father for his own ends. That she meets the king as an equal even so. - In Alberta at this moment - the highway by Demmit - most of the snow is gone. Grey-brown, white and blue. It looks as though the lens is wet, a shower passed. I have only one session of transcription left for the summer of 1981. Just copied the last time I lived at the Valhalla house, July 1981 for maybe a week. Restless, hooked on Robert, not knowing it is the last time I'd see it until 1992 with Louie, eleven years later. Eleven years! Helmer and Bernice dead, the windows broken open again. And then not until 2005, thirteen more years, Ed, Joyce, Janeen, Frank all gone, the chimney fallen, the porch rails collapsed, the kitchen floor caved down, no driveway anymore. I was 36 and am 63. I am 36 and 63. It's only March 25 and in Grande Prairie the snow is completely gone. There will be four more years of torture with Jam. Some notes I'll be glad to see again. Jam - I won't blame her because it was my doing - Jam never truly liked me - I hooked her by means of her weakness for something that reminded her of her mother and then suffered because she didn't want me - I did it for my own purpose - I will have to see what the record says about whether the years of misery were worth it - was she good for my work? Yes and no. Could it have been done another way? Maybe not. Did she owe me $22,000? If she cheated on me she did. I think she must have. I was in such insecurity there must have been something I didn't know. It's Tuesday afternoon. I'm having my first free day this cycle. There are garden things I should do and won't do today. Twelve days. Jaes "I am amazed and encouraged by this experience and that you want me to write more. This is a gift you are giving me without measure. I've carried a burden of secrets unable to share my life except in fragments here and there. I sense that if I could weave it together cohesively it would liberate me. It already feels like it has in the little bit I wrote." Suddenly a bunch of hits on Work & days from a Facebook post at Cap College. Half hour this aft. Somebody who came in through Frank after. 30 hits on the index today - ! Earthlink in LA. Somebody in Portland Maine checking through to Theory.
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