| in america 15 part 5 - 2008 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
July 1st
It's 3:30 in the morning - when I had lain down last night this loud constant hiss in my ears - it's still there - is it the fan's after-tone? Is it the thing that makes my skin sting, happening now in organs? Two images - the woman rising as a dragon and smoking the dead man - the burnt woman who has one eye and a claw hand and who also has her moment of rising.
The sensation of dragon - authority, autonomy - a sensation I have
Am hacking away at 1983, 130 of 200 pages left in this vol and then another 200 in the last. Doing vol 12 [In America] at the same time, will finish it tomorrow, then finish #10, then two more vols including this one. This morning went to the Y downtown for breakfast with Tom, then to Ballpark Storage to get photos. I'd brought over my scanner and the old G3 with Photoshop on it and showed him how to scan. First image Vic in swim trunks holding his little boy on the beach, a wave behind him, second image Mac before her hair turned white feeding a bottle to a baby standing in a crib. Third image a nun in formidable wimple sitting on a chair next to a deck railing, beside her a thin priest standing. Summer morning downtown. A table next to open casement windows in the Y. Cool air. Summer city. A photo of Ed sent by Paul this morning. It isn't one I remember. He's standing in his ragged work clothes with a white horse. Wearing a cap and windbreaker. Behind him the yard, right to left, small poplars bare in either spring or fall, a poplar-log corral, the pigbarn, next to it a roof of the chop house I think, then the small old chicken house. Some piece of farm machinery in the grass. Chickens wandering, red hens. He looks bitter to me, and he's sexy. I look at his throat and his hand. It's before we moved so he's younger than 39. Some age between 30 and 39. The photo might have a date on it. I don't remember the windbreaker. 3 $1000 from Dave. It means I can scan 33 more slides. Hard decision, which 1. which are printable wholes 2. which would be good as slides on a CD/DVD 3. which would be good texture in relation to notes in origin Juliana Yau - blog - on Double Vision screening yesterday. Notes in origin was my favorite because of Epp's playfulness and superb grasp of time and timing. At the end of each 'note' I hoped there was another, until I fell into Epp's rhythm and understood how many notes there would be. The length of each note was perfect, and her punctuation at the end of the film was direct without taking the audience out of the film. With both Epp and Battle, certain I was in good hands. And Anna wrote saying yes; excited. 4
I have to have a talk with her. This is very awkward.
I was at a movie downtown - went on the bike - when I came out the streets were bright and full - I walked my bike to 4th and stood in one of the open doors of the Golden West. I could smell the lobby. Had nothing changed, the red carpet more worn at its edges I thought. Two men I couldn't quite see at the desk. The shadows of the fans rotating on the ceiling. The two throne chairs, dull paint. I could see the desk men wondering what I was doing but I didn't want to leave, I wanted to go on standing in then. 7 1. Bowker says I cannot buy ISBNs for Ant Bear and have the authors make their own contracts with Lightning - it means they will have to pay at least $400 for expenses. 2. Printer also says we can't put Ant Bear onto a book as publisher so I will have to think of a way to say it as well as using the same imprint. 3. If authors publish on Lightning they will have to have reseller licenses in their home states - I haven't yet found out what that will cost. 4. Favor has a nice blog up. Yesterday aft Tom and I went through the red barrel and a box and sorted his photos and then he read me a notebook from a depressed six months at the Quinta in 1991. In the barrel the hundreds of photos of Tom at all his ages; and then suddenly shocked seeing three of my photos of him. They slammed me - the way he was looking at me. I said You're so young, look how young you are. I've seen those photos before obviously but I felt as if I hadn't, naked heart looking at me, so beautiful, so beautiful, can I be with this man still. - He's not that now, he's a solid man, but I went on silently marveling, how can such a burst of beauty have suddenly happened unprepared in this ordinary afternoon. I was a bit stuck on him after that, watching a doc about wild horses in the Rockies and an episode of Ice Road Truckers. Saturday night The great world of sound. 8 1. I found out what it's going to cost authors now - single ISBN, other costs, 50 copies of the book = $385. They'd have to sell about 25 to break even. 2. Found out the seller's license is free and they won't ask for a business license. 3. Letter from Becci saying she wants to do market tables. 4. [the college] mean-spiritedly saying they won't refund my flight because I didn't pay for it. 5. Went to UTC to buy a hard drive and ask about a monitor. They showed me a 30" monitor that would do RGB and video, huge - $1800 and 126 tax 6. Young man tells me for $100/yr I can have one-to-one tech coaching once a week. Orange Ralph Lauren shirt and more grapefruit shea butter. 9 Woken at 5 by a dream first that I'm with Judy and her (vaguely felt) family and I am noticing she is in better shape than I am. She looks good at her age. There's something about my pots, pots I've made, which I can see on a high shelf above a cupboard, and my yellow rug. Then I'm listening to a woman being interviewed on the radio. She's a writer? She has cancer and is going to die. The interviewer asks when. She says quite cheerfully some year ending in a nine, a couple of years from now, so I assume 2009. Then the interviewer says her name. It's Ellie.
Yesterday morning I woke from a dream that I'd arrive at an appointment with a new therapist and didn't see her in her office. Then saw someone asleep in a bottom bunk. I was a couple of minutes early, would she wake when it was time. She came into the anteroom wearing a belly dancer costume under orange and purple lights. She was going to show me a media presentation. I said I didn't want that kind of therapy, I wanted plain therapy. What else has been happening. Transcribing last year this time noticing the flat short sentences, wondering what they mean, dimly afraid of what they mean. Tom tearing into his boxes of papers, sorting family letters, throwing some of them away, Vic's Mad Life I had called that box. Took him shopping for plastic bins for his storage closet yesterday.
The sacred place, anthology Tom bought second-hand. Kathleen Norris Getting to Hope, essay about being a lay preacher as poet, in a tiny Presbyterian church on the prairie in South Dakota. It made me cry feeling what I could have to tell the congregation at La Glace, that no longer has its church out on the grass. Linda Hasselstrom Buffalo winter, essay about a winter night when she was drunk and stoned and went into the park and sat with buffalo around her. John McPhee From 'A mountain' about hiking with Brower in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington. Katherine McNamara Piety about being given wolverine foot bones in Alaska and being scared of them. 1996 ed Olsen and Cairns University of Utah 11 Fed-Exed my slides to West Coast Imaging - made the decisions, got the parcel assembled, 81 slides picked out, the list printed, the order form printed, all that, all that. It's big. Then finished transcribing 1983 Feb-Aug, 183 pages. One more volume. In this one the constant distress about Jam, a few islands with Ellen Tallman, having company in myself. A lot of reading notes. As I'm transcribing I'm thinking how good that era was in experimental/perceptual art, experimental film and music, what good discussion there was, what a strong home it was. I kept assembling bits into themes: point, line, hover, music, twoness, waves. I was keeping myself in a matrix of concrete abstraction - is that what I mean? - matter based abstraction? - that must also have been a matrix for photos. Want to write about that. - Looking at second level slides today seeing that some of them are strong at the furthest end of my discipline, ie to make photographs that find subtle and total order over a whole frame imposed on natural material. For instance a couple of slides of nothing but long grass or a wind-laid snow surface - the slide of nothing but cultivated earth in furrows - slides of a stone in grass. They aren't the star photos, I didn't pick them for the show, I may not have seen them. They are exercises of the far end of my photographic strength, which is framing. Wondered whether for the themed collections of bits there could be a randomizing algorithm I could tell to order the bits in different ways so I could look at what else can come out of sequence, what is made by an order of two. The notes on music suggesting effects of writing. 14 Dave pressing about the poster, which means I have to invent the show. Should it be Leaving the land?
So there I went to inventing a press page and have given it most of the day. I love the photo. I look at it, more than the collection of praise paragraphs, and feel I came through the misery and confusion (transcribing 1983) knowing something, forceful. The praise paragraphs stagger me some, were the gatekeepers really saying those things about me? While I was feeling excluded everywhere. Things other people would love to have said about them. Having to think about the talk if I have to think about the poster. I looked at Leaving the land and liked it, but it's done. Dave saying I'll project notes in origin - no, I don't think so. I think the slides and talk about taking pictures. Spoke to Jeff at West Coast this morning - he said Call me anytime. 15 Tom said goodbye to the desk this morning. Note from Don Hanlon Johnson. 12:38 7/15/08 your work. Dear Ellie, I am very taken by your writings on mind, your intricacy, nuance, and deep thinking through of it all. You inspire me. Best wishes, PhD in philosophy at Yale 1971, first graduate program in somatics, professor of somatics at CIIS. Ex-Jesuit. body practices, experiential wisdom taking stands in favor of the crucial importance of our material reality educators who have developed practices for accessing and cultivating the stores of wisdom, creativity and courage that live within our bodies courses in philosophy, theology and the classics taught by the Jesuits who were by far the most interesting and engaging adults I had ever met center of my life's work, an inquiry into the primal origins of thought and value in the realm of experience novels explored in a more intimate way the intricacies of first-hand experience, and a crafting of the kind of language that is closest to experience Dan Berrigan, psychedelics, Charlotte Selver, Esalen, Ida Rolf, rolfed 20 years Perhaps no one has been more eloquent, prolific and wisely critical within this specific enlightenment of the body than Don Hanlon Johnson. He is not familiar with a single body worker who has remained within his or her original church. Conviction that the dynamics of male Catholic asceticism and spirituality, or what Johnson quite correctly dubs "the monastic disciple of the penis," are not so much about repressing and eliminating sexual energies as they are about exaggerating, disciplining, analyzing and sublimating them into more and more intense [homoerotic] forms. realized that his religious superiors were generally "those with proclivities for lace, incense and theatrical gestures" [These are Jeffrey Kripal] Early 60s Jesuits were taking LSD. The protean body Bone, breath and gesture, practices in embodiment Body: recovering our sensual wisdom Body, spirit and democracy Body in psychotherapy: inquiries in somatic psychology Everyday hopes, utopian dreams: reflections on American ideas Groundworks: narratives of embodiment 16 Lunch cooking. Feel I've done the work of the day. Inner pressure. Dave this morning pushing about the poster. Wrote the text for it, posted it on the new press page, which I love, and then was thinking if I want artists to come I should try to get a notice into Art of the Peace. Emailed the editor. Rowen wanting money for clothes - has a job at the Sears photo studio. Tom with small piles on his floor, army letters arranged by month. 17 The subtle white noise. I don't think I hear it at Tom's. I was dreaming something about color - saying I'm not so scrupulous now about not changing color quality in photos because I've noticed how I can change the color of what I really see from moment to moment. While I'm thinking that in the dream I'm looking from a square attic window onto a city hillside where the roofs of buildings are red and green squares in dim light. I look again and the colors are a little different. Something I should remember to note, about very short term memory. When I'm working with two open documents and I need to go from one to the other to copy a date, say, I can arrive at the second document and have forgotten what I was going to do there, though it was only a second. Was at Bassam this morning thinking about the PRC talk and what came to me was that it should be Leaving the land 2, which would take up from where I left off, the land being a test of mind. I could talk about having gone away and learned attention and demonstrate that attention in the slides, talk about what I can see in the slides, what was being felt. - I was in and out of the jeep parked in front of Dawes Marketing, carrying out a rosemary bush and digging the spading fork out of the back. I was wearing blue jeans with rolled cuffs, pale blue Chuck E's, fitted orange shirt. I was kidding with the young women at the reservation desk outside Mukashi. A young woman, Japanese-looking, said "I like your style." "What style is that." "Your style. And I like your hair." I loved that. I beamed. Somebody liked what I like, which is the look of the blue jeans with orange cotton, the fitted cut of the shirt, the way it's a physical casual 63. The beat-up pale blue sneakers. She was saying she liked my body - I felt. 18 Tom across the table at Maria's this morning talking about reading Vic's letters and his own. The voice in Vic's letters nearly always a false Jewish gangster street voice, he said, and he'd reply in the same false voice. 19 At a loss today. It's Saturday. Tom's house later. I've transcribed my daily sets of pages from both 1983 and 2007, cleaned up all the clippings on surfaces, made notes from some, have cleaned house (yesterday caught up with the answer file) all the way down to orange oil on the floor and stripped sheets, and it isn't 3 yet. I'm addled by having to think about the PRC talk out of order, when I should be concentrating on Ant Bear and the res lectures, which are now two weeks away. Thinking about the PRC talk is making me uncertain whether to do the three lectures I've thought of or whether to simplify to two, or whether to make one of them the same talk. Mind and land: vision and intuition in the open air. Denis Donoghue The pragmatic American: William James and our homegrown way of thought Harpers January 2007 Santayana said he "kept his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy." Impressed with evolutionary origin and use of thinking. Says philosophers attenuate "the spiritual principle to a thoroughly ghostly condition." I believe that 'consciousness' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a non-entity, and has no place among first principles ... the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy. In Does consciousness exist 1904. - Function not entity. [Breath] is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which the philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. This entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience, of so brave a total world ... Identify your life therewith; then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way. The principles of psychology ch IX The stream of thought an alternation of flights and perchings The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the "substantive parts," and the places of flight the "transitive parts," of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. - Bonobo Congo River basin Irene Pepperberg Alex the African grey parrot 21st Monday morning. I taught Tom [Suzanne] Somers' eating system and he has lost 17 pounds. He looks beautiful in his little jockey's lying next to me. All his family papers are filed in envelopes in clear plastic bins. Last week he read everything. He would wake early and work until he slept. While he was on the bike yesterday I read through the army envelopes. [His first wife's] letters frantic, I love you, I miss you, you're my whole life, I dream of you every night, I can't wait until we can be together again, I know you love me as much as I love you, I know we will be together forever. She cried. She thought of suicide. Desperately enslaved and completely impersonal. She wasn't writing to a friend she wanted to talk to, she was writing to a fantasy she was completely hooked by. Young, with a baby, pretty but not intelligent, isolated, alone for the first time in her life, trapped in faithful waiting. There was one letter with a different quality, as if she'd had a moment of calm. In it she saw that she went overboard with both her husband and her son because she was guilty for rebellious thoughts. There's a letter from Vic where he says [she] is like Mac, "all woman, all feminine," when she gives herself she gives herself altogether, she lives for Tom and Joey. A couple of things about that.
Another thing I think I saw in her letters, and Tom's too, is that Tom was still idealistic and uncompromised when he went to Okinawa. He came back morally wrecked and she had no clue, and Vic didn't either. He was on his own not knowing what had happened to him. He was in a false relation to both his dad and [his wife]. He was only back three months when he busted it up. He was a bad man in his own eyes.
22nd
Another thing, Emilee wrote. She's not at ease. This letter had a posed sound as if she was trying to be what she used to be. Is that it? The mother took revenge. It rumpled her aura. It disrupted a central well-being. Went to Mexico and got the TN. 25 50 year old Dutch woman watches her husband and three children 17-23 fall off a mountain near Mont Blanc. -
the right side of the face and head and the right hand, which had been charred to the bone Further west than west / beyond the land / my people are dancing / on the other wind. The woman of Kemay In that first moment, he told me, it was no woman he saw at all in the doorway, but a blaze and glory of fire, and a glitter of gold scales and talons, and the great eyes of a dragon. "... in the beginning, dragons and humans were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language. "They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free. "But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly further and further, hunting and eating their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more. "Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned . And they came to fear the wild ones, who might come flying and destroy all their dear hoard. "Among them were some who saved the learning of the dragons - the True Language of the Making - and these are now the wizards. "When the one people were becoming two, some of them, still both human and dragon, still winged, went not east but west, on over the Open Sea .... There they live in peace, great winged beings, both wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart. "... who we are, and where our wholeness lies." gazed through a gap in the thickets at the western sky ... that far, clear, golden space of light the sinuous, iron-dark body borne by long, webbed wings as red as fire, the out-reaching claws, the coils of smoke fading behind it in the air ... the glitter of rust-black scales and the gleam of the long eye ... the red tongue that was a tongue of flame ... stink of burning ... hissing roar ... breathed out a sigh of fire. Its feet clashed on the rock. The thorny tail, writhing, rattled, and the wings, scarlet where the sun shone through them, stormed and rustled as they folded down to the mailed flanks. The head turned slowly. Kalessin. crept into bed beside the little, warm, silky silence that was Therru asleep. She slept, and her sleep opened out into a vast windy space hazy with rose and gold. She flew. Her voice called "Kalessin." A voice answered, calling from gulfs of light. a rage that burned in her ... the length of her body like a rod of fire. "You have a fire around you, a shining of fire all about your head." And then, what's this, a turn in the story, a sudden turn that bites me hard so tears jump into my eyes. "I am Tenar of Attuan," she said. He stood still. She said, "I think you are the king." "You can come back across the mountains. There is a way. He knew it. But the name of the mountains is Pain." the soft, unhurt side of her face as expressionless as the rigid, scar-masked side The child's voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. Tenar and Ged have a winter talk. "... but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves." "Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Ged asked. a huge voice like a broom of metal dragged across a gong Le Guin Ursula 2001 The other wind Harcourt Le Guin almost 80. October 21 1929. Books with wrong names, Powers, Gifts, Voices - that don't have what most of her books have. They have plots but less love? - What there is in Tehanu - sensory presence, love for the kitchen, the garden, the orchard, the man's face, anyone who is well-borne. Jane Mayer on Bill Moyer talking about torture. A fine plain dark face, sober, confident, light-spirited. 28 Tom's last night. We had turned off the light and got into our beds and I wanted to talk. He did what he does. He said "I'm going to sleep now." Usually I let it go but I called myself up and asked him what it is that scares him about talking in the dark. I had to push some, but then it was happening quite naturally, Tom on his back with his knees up, his voice going on. What he's afraid of: that he won't feel what he thinks he should feel.
What else - because I taught him Suzanne Somers on eating he is down to 180, which is more than twenty pounds. He's drinking water, exercising, eating fruit and vegetables and no bread or chips. He looks beautiful. 29 This morning I was sitting at the table with the computer in front of me when the room pitched like a ship. Swayed solidly I think north-south for six seconds? It's hard to tell how long, because while it was happening I was bemused and vacant. Another thirty seconds and Nora downstairs hollered Earthquake! Everyone was going online googling Earthquake San Diego. Chino Hills outside LA, 5.4. Pussy musk. At the movies with Tom and lying next to him watching TV smelling my own jeans crotch, a smell I like, warm biscuits. I asked Tom whether he could smell it. "Pussy musk?" he said. SFU has put pdf versions of masters theses online - there's Analogue/digital and also Modern commons: place, nature and revolution at the Strathcona Community Gardens. 30th What did I do today - sent revised PRC blurb to Dave - correspondence with Ruth about office and dorm - sent revised dragon blurb to Em - wrote Jennifer about VT taxes - asked SFU for PhD special arrangement docs - booked flight SAN-YVR, hours cold in Starbucks trying to book YVR-YEG and check YEG-YQU - phoned to check on the slide scans - took tax refund check to the bank on the bike - wrote and sent support letters for Layla - mailed Dave's check to the G&F - had to poke around finding addresses - and in the end thought the G3 had crashed and taken all the lectures and the last three DR journals plus a volume of Fading. Had to go fetch the old G3 from Tom's to try its battery, which somehow worked. 31st Someone in China google-searched "Ellie Epp" and clicked straight through to Being about. I don't know what that means. Can't imagine a story that would make that happen. A lot of dreaming these nights. I was in a house kneeling at a window with covers to my chin looking out. A thin long-haired young man came out of the house next door. Looked at me. I liked his face though it was not quite right. Smiled. He lifted his camera. I imagined him seeing someone who was staring out of sleep. Let him take pictures, turned my head. Walking out through snow, somewhere in a city I thought of as Toronto. It was so white I couldn't see the path. Walking on, falling in step with a woman and talking with her, etc, coming through a building. Etc. Before I woke, looking into a corridor I knew was Paul K's, maybe a corridor into his photo studio, wide and very brightly lit. There are sheets pinned up that I think are technical lists. I walk halfway down and stop. He comes out complaining that I was (strenuously) teaching math at night. He says if they can do it they will, meaning that teaching is useless. I say Fuck you and turn around and leave. Mainly that dream was the look of the lit corridor with sheets of paper here and there on the walls. It had a look of sheetrock set up temporarily to divide up a large space like a basement. It was broad and had a crook, and there was all that incandescent light on white walls. Finished transcribing DR today, in Fading only this vol not caught up. Showed Tom the press page, got the statement by writing what I thought were intro paras for the talk itself. 1st August A Rhoda dream. Someone suggested she should stay with me and there she was in bed under a table (?) across the room. I in mine. In the morning she turns on the TV! I'm hating it but wait. Then suddenly she has gone, the space is clear. I go turn the TV off. Later in the same dream (Jim Smith) in a long skirt. He's going to live in the big damaged house with me. Which room? I follow him across the hall. It's a good room. The wallpaper isn't ripped, good windows and it's warm with afternoon sun. Then later something about Judy. A bag of food I'm looking at curiously because it has been there for months and it looks fresh. The house is like houses I've dreamed before, a three-storey house with a lot of damage in the roof. The dream also referred to apartments I've dreamed T and R in before, in the apartment building next to 824 E Pender. When I woke I was thinking of a quality I felt in myself in the early days in 824 - a sensation of quality and also a stance. I wonder can I remember it well enough to name it. I don't think it shows in the journal record. Is it related to what I've done when I write papers. A kind of dive to essence: what is this really about. Going to simplicity. Something like a belly dive. It's also related to that word 'purity' that shows up in writing about Trapline. Clean love? Something else about how things happen, things coming right as if I'm in touch with the whole. I'm trying to remember a particular moment of feeling it. It's in the back room at the desk with the big silver mirror against the pale green. Summer evening. It's a clean dedication to living in truth, willingness to do whatever that truth decides. What it has to do with Rhoda is that I imagined her to be that, though she likely is not. She looks like that.
What I used to call conscience.
The big damaged house is my present state. I'm on the ground floor, the upper floors are empty and more wrecked. A gay man in women's clothes across the corridor is not a good thing.
The scans came today. $2791. How are they - so-so - lurid but maybe I can fix that - not interesting in closeup, not grainy - the dark ones aren't interesting though some of the bright ones are - surprisingly clean - they're not what I wanted them for - I don't think - but I will see what I can do with them - they looked good at 8% - some of them too magenta, some too cyan - not remotely printable I don't think. 2 Saturday early. I like the thoughts I have when I wake, though they are often grim. They are thoughts about life. For instance this morning I saw a man carrying home a Christmas tree and said, There is so much of that, over and over.
4th Airport, midday, flight in an hour. Ruckus with Margo these last days - there was a lot of back and forth and I was firm and eloquent in my own defense - and Margo had to back up on a lot of her prejudgments - but there is a remainder, which is that I despise Francis and don't want to not despise him - I'm generally careful not to say what I think to students but at times I probably leak it. M wants to say 'personal' is different from 'intellectual' but in this case it is not. Francis to me is centuries of male priesthood, complacent entitled mediocrity. I want to defend students from that more than I want to be approved by faculty. What else - in relation to Emilee I had something to lose if she got along with Francis - yes - I didn't want her to go the way of piety - I wanted her to stay with me. I'm not sure I didn't wreck Emilee's semester in fact, in ways I am not going to admit to M because I now don't trust her. So this is for my own record: how would I have done that. By saying I wanted to stay in touch with her work, so she sent packets to me and therefore ended up writing them for me? Which Francis would hate? The other way to think it would be the way I was feeling it, which was that I wanted to defend Emilee's brilliance from his blindness to it. I wanted her to be able to have backup from someone who can see her, the way I would like to have had backup from someone who could see me. This can't be said - it's what I wouldn't trust M to be able to hear - M's path isn't loyalty in hard truths, it is smoothening by positive description. Is there a crux of it: yes - would Emilee's spirit and Emilee's work have been better if she had had a confluent semester with Francis? After the tantra essay she didn't do good work. She would have had to do what she can do already. She is going against her grain working with F. [opposite page: analysis of dealings with Em during the semester] Plainfield 7th
|
