| in america 16 part 3 - 2008 october-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
30 October 2008 I dreamed I was telling someone that advising is always about dissociation. Diagnosis. Then woke thinking about Macy. Is it the only time I've dreamed about advising? What do I know about Macy so far. Her history is dire, it is harsher than I can imagine well. She has used sex to give herself what she couldn't get the way other people get it. In her disability / gender queer community there is a lot of dissociation. She's having sex with people who are lying from the base. She is very smart and she is courageous, she presents herself to be seen. She's lucid in writing. But her voice is physically weak, childish. There's the way she speaks to her daughter in babytalk. There's the fact that she married Cal, who is grotesque. She's afraid of anger because it would isolate her.
31 I've chopped through the first four vols of Forming, the last one the summer in BC with Frank, Judy and Paul. Starting the Europe year. What have I liked - passages where I quote Opa and Oma, hear their voices. Oma's play. Conversation with Rasheed, where I have them verbatim. There isn't much of that. In Strasbourg, where I quote the French or German. The firm ear I had. My love for particular speech. Why is the visual description not interesting. When I'm philosophical it sounds grandiose, it's not my own language yet. - Is that the whole of it? No. Was I having heavy existential feelings instead of down-home real feelings maybe? Something. At the SUPA conference in March Olivia helped herself to Tugwell, who I'd been having a shy little courtship with for months. (And I lost the International House election, had been fired at Sunnyside, the political crowd was going into the poverty project.) I didn't fight with Olivia, what had happened hit me in silence. What I remember feeling is dim quiet protest, women need to be loyal to each other. O had betrayed me. I hardly felt it but I fled. She'd undermined me as a woman in our community and I fled backwards to where I'd been someone's most desired. Hadn't thought of it but it's light on why I slept with Frank. Meantime there was Rasheed and though I didn't know it, Judy was tunneling me in the same way with him. It was a lot of damage where I was fragile. I handled it by screwing Sharon over with Frank - that's hideous. Went away alone like being sent to the hospital again, dug back into the lonely pilgrim. Have never seen it was a repetition. Two years with O and then. Judy and O - why did they do it? I've assumed revenge, which maybe tells me that's what I felt when M did it. Revenge for what. My talents. So there I was in Europe making connections with strangers, being fed and transported by strangers, loved by strangers. Writing their stories. Came back and lived with O again and never mentioned what she'd done, or what I'd done, or what Don did before he married her. Our relation had an unconscious I didn't know to speak. The relation with women did. A murderous countercurrent with the most intimate. It's a light on why the women's movement was such a relief, we could make men a common enemy and for a while not live on a floor with a gaping hole into foundational undoing. And what does it cost me now to have no woman I trust? Is that the withdrawal this is?
I woke from a dream that I was with Indian women. They were explaining that someone had hexed me (not their word), someone in the community I'd come from. They were bulky and their houses were dirty but they had authority, I was interested in them. Something about a book of knitting patterns from indigenous women in South America, they knitted patterns they had taken for instance from the shape of a stream - I saw one that had a shape with a raised bit that was a place where the current rose above the surface. [sketch] In the dream I saw the stream and the knitted piece to compare them. As I was walking the bike from the farmers' market yesterday I saw an unusual bit of crocheting on the grass beside the sidewalk. It was a collar or necklace, made of quite coarse black twine, circular, maybe 6" wide, frilled out from a narrower band. I was talking to Lise about Macy and the femme strategy, and I said I had done that in my 30s. She said she couldn't imagine it, the way I dress is perfectly androgynous, and my shoulders - I mind that, I want to be exquisite always. She said she wanted me to do a workshop on love woman. Love woman and the dark descent. I want to look exquisite and be as competent as I am, and this competence doesn't look exquisite. Among women the way men fall into insignificance. Eurydice want to be / want to be / pretty. I also dreamed about Jam. I was transcribing pages about or for her, from journal into journal. In Forming there is going to be a thread about visual formation, it'll be Forming 1. Queen's, where it's an interest in objects, not very fine-tuned, and then Forming 2. London, where there are the museums and libraries. At the end of Forming 1 I get a camera. Those first slides - yes. Martin Ware replied and I sent him the passage from April 64. If he doesn't reply now what will I feel. Better to ask what's the fantasy. That he'll be charmed by the writing and want to write back and I'll have a smart literate successful man to talk to. There are so many moments when the mindlessness of Tom's conversation shuts me down. He is so slow to make a point, he's so unaware of his listener, he repeats, he loves his old saws, he gets violent, curses and maligns casually. Then there'll be a moment, for instance when I showed him my letter to Macy, when he locks in and is nothing but smart and fresh, brilliant. Other moments when he riffs - an English professor couldn't do that. I stayed at his house an extra night and this morning I was worn out, I couldn't stand him. His old man's body too. He looks good in clothes but he's often taking off his shirt and striking a body builder's pose - I can't stand the repetition, he's always going to do exactly the same thing, that rote unreal gesture. It's good he's lost his gut and swum every day for months, but it's the tight crook of his back I always have to see, the loss of muscle over his whole frame, his old man's scrawny bones. 1966-67. It's not manic any more. I stop being bright-faced, I write long sociological sermons to my mom, Olivia's with Don and in the background, I'm ambivalent with Greg the way I go on ambivalent with any lover from then on.
November 4 2008 Obama 349, McCain 162. Governors 29/21. Senators 56/41. Congress 252/173. Obama got Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania. (Missouri, North Carolina not called yet.) What it was like last night watching CNN. We were on MSNBC at first, when Tom had picked me up after work. Olberman, Maddow, Mathews, effervescent as states were being called, the states we'd worried about. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and then it looked like even Florida. At eight o'clock exactly polls closed on the west coast and Olderman didn't have to hold himself back. California, Oregon and Washington lit up blue and Obama was declared elected. There Tom switched to CNN, which was holding on the crowd in Chicago, a huge space full of people. When Obama was speaking, whenever there was a pause, the producer would cut to faces in the audience - Jesse Jackson standing anonymous pressed shoulder to shoulder with many, tears flowing unwiped. Oprah behind her bf crying too. A young black woman fallen to her knees. Radiant people. I was not quite crying but very cracked, with a pressure of weeping that wouldn't break. Seeing the crowd's faces was seeing my own. The first family - for me it's not so much that they are black as that they're smart and real, they are beautiful. This time beauty won, intelligence won. A wife who looks her husband sweetly in the eye and kisses him like a friend. Each of them holding the hand of a daughter. Barack's smile, his grace, poised precision of speech. [newspaper clippings, LA Times photo of the four of them on the platform, red and black] 5 Today I've been pushing through vol 6, which is third year at Queen's and the summer in Alberta. It's done. Am leaving vol 5 Europe till I'm done with Kingston, want to see all of Queen's before I'm somewhere else. Two vols left - am 13 pages into vol 7 which is 4th year, and then it'll be vol 8 the Lawford-surgery year. I've just done Sept 20 1967 where I announce I'm going to make films. I announce it before I meet Peter. -
So many thanks for sending the wonderful passage from your journal - so poignant, so funny, so generous, so very flattering to me. Weren't we so romantic? So responsive to the stirring of mutual feeling, so alive in our senses, so imaginatively enraptured by what was presented to us, so vulnerable to being suddenly swept away. I'm pretty certain that in those days I would have been a risky proposition for a loving young woman, too much of a dreamer, not very practical, yearning for an impossible degree of scope, slightly muddle-headed, a bit unsure of myself in a culture that was new to me - not offering the poise and assurance which is a very desirable, if not absolutely essential, quality in a partner. Hope you found someone more deserving than me! Excuse my going on at such length in response to your sharing with me of that passage from your marvelous nineteen-year-old's journal. - After Alberta I hitchhike back and that trip is high and bright, unlocked into the world again, as if I had touched down someway. 6 Baby Cakes patio, Friday aft. Packets Monday. Is this the day to pick up Ant Bear. I read over those paragraphs above for what pleasure they give me again and again. "So poignant, so funny, so generous." "So responsive to the stirring of mutual feeling, so alive in our senses, so imaginatively enraptured by what was presented to us, so vulnerable to being suddenly swept away." That's said in quite a bit my own way isn't it - it's true of me eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and then by twenty one already less. I read it over happy to be described. And then "yearning for an impossible degree of scope," which is still true. I wasn't wrong about him. He loves Newfoundland. "Fiords and bays and coves ... gorges out through craggy cliffs ... long black rivers ... rounded hills and small precipitous mountains ... kayaking Gros Morne and the Long Range mountains ... burnovers and barrens ... history of dire struggle." teach our gentle natured undergraduate students from towns and small communities of Western and Northern Newfoundland and the Labrador ... 9-person English department ... Shakespeare's coming of age as an artist trickster. through rough waters to the sacred island of Sgung Gwaii (with its slowly crumbling totems) ... kayaking through a flock of Harlequin ducks. What do I know about Newfoundland and the Labrador - Kenneth's stage at Occasional Harbour, Newfie voices. Some kind of notion of Neal Gunn, Celtic Faerie in the round hills? Some of that wild heart in them. The sort of life he gave himself, rooted, always honoured in his community, teaching beautiful language in a small college that's on the far east of the country, happily married, ie faithful, and to his children. It's the white door life that I imagined for myself with half my head, he did know what he wanted. It's a solid life, integral. - What there is to notice in 1967/68 - I come through intellectually, I'm caught up in English and philosophy; have leapt to the idea of film, have begun to be able to speak - and then I go nuts sleeping around.
5th was - the camera, the hip, hetaira. Europe was about cutting loose from family, country, money, habit, morality, language, school - I'd been in school 14 years. (I went to London just before the moon shot - that was good.) Came home and couldn't tell what I had in me, a dumb mass of intensity - I had taken in so much, had been so many people and places. The year was a test of capacity I didn't think of as a test - I got back and I was larger than Queen's, I was larger than the middle class, I'd gone to my existing edges. Later I was promiscuous because sex wasn't much of a deal for me - I was out of the family economy - didn't know yet that that would open out - to independence for - I'm sidestepping the word - art. - Listening to Gwen Ifell interviewing reporters on Obama's transition strategy and realizing I'm going to be interested in watching a very smart man thinking how to do what he has to do. A massively minute job. "Who is the best prepared to do the best job for the country." Meritocracy. The end of disgust seeing inferior people given critical responsibility. A constitutional scholar. "An idea of what America can be." He's going to be managing a world system - "hard core realism" and more empathy, both. I want to see how smart someone can be. What else - Shakespeare? Mozart? Hegel? how he's going to deal with those competing demands rejoicing across the planet a 21st century campaign fear-mongering didn't work an ear for language listen and synthesize at a deep level My hope is for quality. A wonderful woman professor talking to Bill Moyers, her natural low quite confident rapid voice [Patricia Williams, Columbia]. We have had eight years of a complete failure to govern. There was no oversight. part of a tradition of political orators ... a kind of speech that is like a sermon ... breaking through this divisive unconscious vocabulary Abolitionists invented the dialogue about equality. a new kind of cosmopolitanism about race Republicans from 1968 winning the negrophobe whites after the Dems supported civil rights. But then religious right and economic elite. Phillips 1998 The politics of rich and poor a corollary to the rise of finance "Rewards go to a very narrow group" compared to manufacturing. 9 Talking to Louie last night. There's a lot to say at once - Why did I get tired and need to stop, why do I, with Louie, although we were opening down. Talking about Obama, the images of his family, what those images say as spirit, why I haven't read images of Bush that way. The recent images of Bush showing him trashed, a grey head disordered, saying it's because he keeps himself unconscious of what he's done, if he would realize it he could have tragic beauty - is that true? The cost of his unconsciousness. Louie said a kind of innocence, I said no I don't think the choice to be unconscious is that. I sent her Martin's note and she said he's in and out of convention. "Something in your writing reminds him of his own, that's why he wrote so much." I was looking for Labrador passages in Aphrodite's garden this morning to send him and reading the times with Ken I was feeling I could make them a book and it would be interesting and successful.
Then Garrison Kiellor begins by talking about Obama's daughters - he and his woman singer break into America the beautiful. The presidency of daughters. - Finished 4th year, am 10 pages into 1968-9. 10th Workshops - what should I do. Wild research. Love woman and the legend of Biel. Love woman and the know-it-all. Tell the story. 11
12 Bad things - some of what I did today, six pages on RF8 wiped out, and the whole of RF7 corrupt so if I open it Word freezes. Can't open Word from the desktop. Explorer won't open SFU directly, freezes if I try, I have to go through Google. 13 Weeding AG19 for the Ken story. Feeling how much there is an a volume of that time, compared with what I was transcribing yesterday, 1969. The quotations in RF8 are stiff male paragraphs about 'man,' my small flights of thinking are irrelevant inventions of metaphor, there's a lot of flat physical description, sometimes but rarely a good instant. Too much about men. A good snapshot of Peter's family on Christmas night. AG19 has the battle with Louie, a lot of psychology, eloquent dreams, sweet moments of house and neighbourhood, a formed person cracking open bravely and interestingly. In 1969 I was investigating relation, hardly wrote about work. Was investigating relation quite randomly, with whatever man came along. I was so good looking that there was easily always someone. Am proud of the way I didn't give myself up for Peter. With all those men, Desser, Ron, Robert de Chazal, Peter - but not Chris Cordeaux - I'm feeling the waste of feeling they were, the irrelevance - except that Peter got me to England. Why is Chris the exception. I want to say because he was so relaxed. The others were neurotic and I was neurotic with them. With Chris I relaxed in a way that still feels good to me. With Peter's neuroticism I got very thinky. I haven't finished saying how good I think AG 17-19 are. I believe they're interesting, that's the point. Interesting to whom. 14 What someone else in my position might have done I am not sure. Very likely, when they paid off such a job as I had, they might have gone on a three-day drunk. What I did was get a room in a small hotel and take three showers a day, finding my way, in between times, to the library, where I began reading John Motley's The rise of the Dutch Republic, and when I finished that I went west. - Louis L'Amour 1989 Education of a wandering man I'm into the Europe volume now, all of Kingston is done. Transcribing aergrammes packed corner to corner with tiny writing. I'm so bold - I'm depressed, I'm broke, I'm lonely, I get on my bike and go to Germany. Sleep two nights in a ruined castle, on a bed of leaves. - There go online and discover it was the Fortress of Schauenberg. A couple of photos. The way I just walked out into the world and made acquaintance. Fréddie who'd been in the Luftwaffe at seventeen, Férdinand from Côte d'Ivoire. Brought back stories and sometimes voices, the tour bus driver whose joke I remembered in his exact words. The many stories I lost. - I've transcribed 34 pages of Europe today, it's all I did, I get entrained in the speed I had then, the sheer capacity and presence. What I'm good for now is so different. It sighed a huge sigh there. What can I do now, in this slowness. I can resolve something, I can think, I couldn't then. I could grok but I couldn't track. I could play. The story of playing with my guards when the inspectors were holding me in Paris.
There's more journal than I thought, pages from before I began the [lost] yellow book.
A Hamit Deguti died in Harris County Texas Feb 17 1981. 15 Page 50, Sunday morning, listening to Garrison Kiellor, cooking lunch, salmon. Santa Ana. 17 Monday morning, exquisite light at 7:30. Three packet letters to write, can I do them all today - I've written the hard ones. Just want to keep whacking at the Europe year, see what's there. In this next term, can I get to Ant Bear at last. Start working on two workshops, The legend of Biel and Obama, somehow. Some kind of love woman workshop. Orpheus? With a reading from Ovid. Before then should I get a voice recorder. Minicourse: deep stories about girl soul. In these stories girl is soul. Mythos something in us is always dreaming. Who is the poet. The figures of a collective self. The meaning of depth. 18 O day. Breathe it. The point of a palm tree that sticks straight up, just a line. Rumbles that are dark in the air. Follow myself. The fleshy sky. Not nothing. Sounds are marks if I hear them. Passionflower high in the pepper tree, one bee poking. White jet a small steady swimmer. Where is he. 19 91 pages, there's more, not much from Greece. Yesterday when I shipped the three letters written Monday I was done, phoned Tom. He said "Let's not do any of that other stuff, let's just go." Up 8 to Japatul Road, the Pine Creek trail. Bite of our heels on the grit. The chaparral looks radiant. Sniffing a bit of Cleveland sage. Walked up the road alone, sat on the bulldozer ridge with my eyes closed listening to exquisite silence, a whisper of leaftop. Then we drove. I was fading away from Tom's lame remarks, imagining a man I'd like to hear language from, an inner contempt, hidden I hope, I look at him hoping I'll see something I like, he has a handsome moment and I'm hopeful, and then he says something stupid and false, a Vic sentence, and I lapse away. I hear him brownnosing his bosses and pals like a salesman. I have no physical attraction to him, zero. When he's working and we skip the weekend I don't care, except that I like his place. It might be that he's been sloppy about money and owes me, that likely would do it, he hasn't planned and didn't use his time off to set something up, is back at Hands On where he said he'd never be. There might be something else too, some unrealness. I find myself not wanting to make an effort, not particularly wanting to leave but as if internally drifting away. He's using my jeep full time and would have no work without it. I don't see an opening ahead to get it back. He's putting miles on it and I'm the one who will pay for repairs. On the other hand he's paying rent on the place we both use, and it's maybe $400 a month more than he'd be paying in a single room. He may end up losing it.
20 Note from the college saying they want the mbo site carved back severely - it's a blow. I'll move it to SFU, I'll take off mentions of [the college] and the program, but what will I do about workshops, semester magazines? [They backed down.]
If I move it and delink it can I still say [the college]. We can still use it to funnel people into the program. Note saying the college doesn't advocate it.
Woke this morning from a sweet dream that I was with Peter T, just that, soft open heart. Light pollution 150 miles around population centres. Count stars visible in Orion - in cities, 11 - far enough away, 50. 21 Here's a letter to my mother from 1966. And sex, always sex, mama mia what do you think I'm up to? Do you see me coming home with a string of illegitimate grandchildren? Frankly, the idea appeals to me - I just may have some illegitimate children some day, but it won't be by accident, and not yet because I'm too young to be a mother. And so on, reading this letter now I'm disgusted at Mary's unending anxious fuss. Her intelligence failed. I was firm in my own way and I was patient with her, I fondly humorously kept trying. "Don't you see that what I do is what is necessary, even morally obligatory (if I may use a word I distrust) for me to do? I want to do what I find right and good, and part of what I am looking for always, in every 'casual' experience, is the insight and courage that I need to do this!"
I still have a sore heart about her, I still want her to praise my courage and my large wish. I still want to be able to trust her and not have to fend her off.
She unrelentingly has campaigned against my spirit. That's the truth and I hold it though it's a gaping ache. I was trying to make it not so, I still sometimes try.
22 Twenty pages into London though I found some more Kingston when I was sorting all the London bits this morning. A trip with Greg to Cornwall, had forgotten Exmoor and the forest of Shelbourne. The misery after Peter. How stoutly I defended my decisions to M. Pile of small Challenge notebooks. Notes that show my lines into feminism and film. What will I want for notes - I should do Forming 1 and Forming 2, London is so distinct from Kingston. London is feminism, pottery, gardening, yoga, body, construction, mysticism, film, reading, photography, poetry, clothes, travel, child, Dorothy Richardson. 6 years. Kingston is academic platform, discipline, tuning, extended friendship, sex, early feminism, the eruption of hippy freedom that Europe was, middle class, clothes, travel. 6 years. 25 56 pages into the first year in London. I love transcribing the first months living on my own in London, Mrs O'Hare's room behind St Pancras, reading in the BFI and the New Westminster Reference Library, at liberty and good looking enough to have little contacts everywhere. I was keeping myself better company in the journals than I had for years - I had escaped something, and had had to centre strongly to do it, and there I was with London all interesting around me. [list of 1969-1970 movies, books, contacts] Tuesday. Flapping some. Poking at In Labrador a bit, wrote a reply to Martin's note of three weeks ago. 26 Ocampo announced an experimental media conference for April of 2010. Mike Hoolboom today invited me into a media archive project funded by the CC. $500 and he'll transcribe critical writing for the site. Susan phoned this morning because she'd been to hear Howard Gardener and thought how much better I lecture - he condescended. I loved speaking to her - her sheer liveness - the way I could start to talk about lecturing on Legend of Biel and find myself thinking further - her adventure in NYC, and the fact that she's there by whatever means, working every day, cutting her edge - inventing a lecture on possibility, assembling bits - an artist's mind, excited - and taken care of for now, someone cooking for her, texting her all day - if that's what she needs - a long view of a river, an elevator with black people and Chinese people and Hispanics in it, Chinatown, Tiffin Wallah - that she's teaching in my way, synoptically, is that the word - not exactly - I meant more like widely assembled. Transcribing Ian today. In those days helplessly swept into chaotic trouble with men - reading what I wrote then it looks like I'm falling in with their distress just because it's there, I'm defenseless. Misery has to escalate to exhaustion, I don't stop it, it has to get worse till something cracks - it was like that with Peter and then I did it again with the next guy - I was banging my head against a wall to appease Ian - I was 24 and free and had money - was the best looking I'd ever been and wanted to make films - and I entangled myself with men who were utterly wrong for me - had no idea what to want - got fastened to the is-ness of whoever they were - had no idea how to do the mating thing - fact: I was hard to match - if there'd been a right person would I have known how to do it? - it's hard to tell - maybe I was just crazy - it looks that way - Roy turns out to have been for Luke and Peter got me to London, but Ian looks just wildly gratuitous and irresponsible - it would have been more honorable to know I wanted a sexy boy after Peter, which was the base truth, but I was going on about respect and liking and having babies with him, which was evil confusion, wicked confusion. He couldn't handle himself with me, I could have known that. Tom signed on for social security today. [notes on pixel size and digital still cameras] [notes on New York hotels and venues] [clipping of Alastair Macaulay's review of Gabriel Misse his partnering make him irresistible: the intimacy between him and Ms Hills was glorious. In "Bahia Blanca" they never varied the formal tango embrace, with his hand on her back, one of her hands resting on his shoulder, and his other hand clasping hers. Their torsos addressed each other powerfully as they traveled around the stage, always maintaining the same column of space between them, while often twisting against it, this way and that. Their heads, however, were inclined gravely toward each other, their eyes lowered throughout, and the only other parts of their bodies that touched were their cheeks, nestling close in an effect of heart-rending tenderness. Neither here nor anywhere else did he ever lift her or spin her in any showy effects. Which is not to say that their dancing was less than sensational. Tango delights in rapid-fire, on-the-spot cross-stitch steps, in which the dancer's feet and knees kept crossing each other with crazy, marvelous insistence, or in scuttling hemstitch steps that scoot the dancer across the stage, and both Ms Hills and, especially, Mr Misse are wonderful at these. Then Mr Misse, while partnering, does more. Steering Ms Hills across the stage in "Reliquias Portentias," he suddenly does an amazing skip-trip step, with such height and pouncing alacrity, twice, that the audience applauds through the music. In one rapidly retreating sequence in "Bahia Blanca," his feet do rippling, heel-toe trills. (Though this may sound like tap dance, it never breaks the tango's elegance.) These are feet that sew, knit, embroider, dart and catch. Meanwhile, their owner seems steadily driven by a calm current of attraction to his partner that seems in one dance the essence of comic brio, in another the epitome of tragic resignation. On the strength of this one viewing, I do not hesitate to call him one of the most intoxicating dancers I have seen. 28 40-some pages today, transcribed the nine months I was pregnant, it's a thin record but I saw something I liked, the way my tone settled later in the fall, I could feel a central column up my middle, what 'centred' means. "I do know the peace and elation and certainty that collect in me when fear and anguish have been very hard on me." [clipping from NY Times magazine Nov 16 on Obama] It was Michelle, Axelrod remembers, who stopped the show. "You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?" she said directly. "What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?" Obama sat quietly for a moment and everyone waited. "This I know: when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently," he said. "And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently." 29 Twenty pages into Luke's first year. When I write M I sometimes sound like Roy. What it was about Roy that settled me. Emotion. The way it used to be with Tom, fear and pain and joy. What else - having a baby was right and Roy was right genetically. I liked testing myself against his assaults.
30 There I went to talk to Tom. He said he's writing Casual labour. He writes even on the days he's working. He has to concentrate to hold it together. The place, the bills, not running. He wants to be respectable for ten years, by which he means not ashamed of himself. Go out strong. If we're not fucking then we're good friends and he'll try to be a good friend to me but there won't be storms of feeling. They're the price of fucking. He thinks about whether he wants to go on never doing that, but we don't seem good at it. He mostly at the moment worries about money, because he has run out his cushion and if he doesn't work for two weeks he's done. I say I long to sometimes talk to someone who finds me wonderful and interesting and draws me out. I need more adventure, less routine. My best times used to be when I was hitchhiking, when there was a new person every half hour. I'm tamped down. It's not his fault. While we're having this talk in Saturday evening lamplight his kitchen is around us warm and smelling of the meatloaf in the oven. I say that in the past when desperation for something built up this way the change did come. It was as if it was building. I said I'd think about sex. There are three reasons we're not. 1. My body's old, I don't have sexual confidence. 2. It hurts me, and (I didn't say) he isn't hard. 3. He doesn't get me sexually, it hurts my feelings that he wants something I think is inferior. I said that because although I hadn't thought of it it does make sense that we'd be locked down if we don't trust each other with that. I was noticing that I was saying I wanted more to happen, but in the event of talking I was wanting things not to happen.
[opposite page: Google notes on Colin Thomas films 1978-2008] December 1st I've just found Mafalda's daughter - a photo of her, not yet email or phone number. Used Google image to find her - Kaliel Roberts wedding June 17, Maya Roberts, Will Roberts Will Roberts 1972-76 married to Mafalda Roque de Pinho Oliveira Reis Phyllis Altman's obit - I had forgotten her name, the woman with the hole in her head - who has turned out to be a mastermind. I'm impressed with the intersections of six years in London - just intersections - David Cooper, Juliet Mitchell, Ros de Lanerolle, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Phyllis Altman, Doris Lessing, Meinhard Rudenauer, Lauderic Caton, Sally Potter, Laura Mulvey, Annabel Nicholson, Colin Thomas, Neil Middleton, the Islington commune, the Khanka, Buddy Hardy. I phoned Eliz - Maya said "It's the very latest style!" Anya
carries the little dog with her - a june bug for Kane, sage for Adam, Lake
Titicaca rock for Levi, sandstone mountain image rock for her Luke.
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